Re: [TIED] Tok bilong John

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2713
Date: 2000-06-21

 
----- Original Message -----
From: John Croft
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, June 21, 2000 7:13 AM
Subject: [TIED] Re: The illusion of understanding the past

 
For goodness' sake, John! To think that there used to be a happy innocent nation without the "Communist Manifesto", and you came along and gave it to them! Nogut boi! But surely you could have coined a plausible Tok Pisin word for "proletarian" (say, proleteri) and defined it in the introduction as "sampela samting bilong manmeri etc." This simple technique has worked for all the European languages. 19th-century Polish had no word for "proletarian", so it borrowed the international neo-Latin term.
 
Piotr
 
 
 
I once had the peculiar task of translating Marx's Communist Manifesto into NeoMelanesian Pigin and I know what it means.  "Proletarian" comes out as "Sampela samting bilong manmeri husat isanupim ananit olgeta arapela manmeri".