English Words That Changed Meaning — Tok Pisin Grammar

Most Tok Pisin vocabulary can be traced to English, which makes the language look easier than it is. Recognising a word is not the same as knowing what it means. Every word below means something other than its English source suggests.

Familiar Word, Different Meaning

is from "grass", and it does still mean grass - but its everyday sense is hair. You will meet it in both senses.

Mi laikim gras bilong yu.
I like your hair.
Em katim gras bilong mi.
He cuts my hair.
I gat planti gras long taun bilong yumi.
There's a lot of grass in our town.

is the ordinary word for a woman or a wife, and it comes from the name "Mary". is any child at all, from "pickaninny", a word that turns up in creoles all round the world. is from "bugger up", but it carries none of that word's force in English: it is the plain, neutral term for something broken or gone wrong, and you can say it to anyone.

Meri ya i no slip.
That woman isn't sleeping.
Sampela taim olgeta samting i save bagarap.
Sometimes everything goes wrong.

Words That Only Look English

Others resemble English words by accident and come from somewhere else entirely. Here the English guess is not merely imprecise but wrong.

, to know, has nothing to do with English "save". It goes back to Portuguese sabe, "knows", carried around the world in sailors' pidgin - the same word that gave English "savvy". It is also the marker of habitual action.

Sampela taim olgeta samting i save bagarap.
Sometimes everything goes wrong.

, food and to eat, is a doubling of kai, "food" in the Polynesian languages. , a grandparent or ancestor, is Polynesian too - compare Māori tupuna. And , never mind, comes from Portuguese por mais que, "however much"; it is related to Malay meski.

Mipela i kaikai lans.
We're eating lunch.
Mipela i gat tupela mama na papa na foapela tumbuna man na meri.
We have two mothers and fathers and four grandparents.
Yumi go long haus piksa o maski?
Shall we go to the cinema or forget it?

Why the Mixture

Tok Pisin took shape on plantations where labourers from many different islands worked side by side and had no shared language. English supplied most of the words because the planters and traders spoke it, but the workers brought their own languages with them, Pacific maritime pidgin had already carried Portuguese words across the ocean, and northern New Guinea was a German colony until 1914. All four layers are still visible in the vocabulary, and none of them is signposted.

What to Do About It

Treat an English-looking word as a hint about where to start, never as the meaning. The resemblance is real often enough to be useful and misleading often enough to be dangerous, and the only reliable way through is to learn each word as its own item.

In the course

Sentences from Lingora’s Tok Pisin course

123 of the course's 500 sentences use this, the first in lesson 7. A few of them, with the words “English Words That Changed Meaning” is about in bold:

Man ya tu slip. Meri ya i no slip.
He is also sleeping. She isn't.
Lesson 16
Meri ya gat wanpela kar i save ron isi stret, dispela kar i no bikpela mani bilong em.
She has a slow, cheap car.
Lesson 110
Yes. Yumi kaikai kuk bilong Saina.
Yes. Let's eat Chinese food.
Lesson 127

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