Captain Cook and the English
Vocabulary
Source
Douglas
Gray, “Captain Cook and the English vocabulary.” Five hundred years of words
and sounds: a festschrift for E.J. Dobson. Ed. E.G. Stanley and Douglas
Gray. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1093. 49-62.
Captain
James Cook
§
where?
Pacific Ocean
o Australasia
o Polynesia
o Antarctica
o NW coast of North America
§
when?
1768-71, 1772-75, 1776-79
Effect
on English language
§
instrumental
in its spread to Australasia
§
place
names and geographical features
§
flora
and fauna, e.g.
o the Cook pine araucaria
cooki
o the large wild pig of New
Zealand (“Captain Cooker”)
§
loanwords,
mostly from Polynesia
o most names of “animals,
plants, foods, implements, or customs”
o only 3 regularly used in
Standard English: kangaroo, tattoo, taboo
Need
or prestige?
“It is probably misleading, even in this extreme
case of a totally strange animal, to think simply of a ‘gap’ in the lexis which
‘needed’ to be filled in this way.”
§
could
have used existing words:
o for kangaroo, hare,
deer, jerboa
§
report:
“an animal something less than a grey hound, it was
of a Mouse Colour very slender made and swift of foot”
§
Cook:
“of a light Mouse colour and the full size of a
grey hound and shaped in every respect like one, with a long tail which it
carried like a grey hound, in short I should have taken it for a wild dog, but
for its walking or runing in which it jumped like a Hare or a dear”
§
Banks:
“making vast bounds just as the Jerbua (Mus
Jaculus) does”
o for tattoo,
“painting”
§
British
predecessor Wallis (cf. peinture by Bougainville)
§
Banks
could have produced a new ‘scientific’ name
o e.g. platypus (“that
even more extraordinary Australian animal”) “eternizes its flat-footedness
§
other
recorded rivals ornithorhyncus ‘bird-bill’ (1800), duck-mole
(1819)
Why
a loanword?
§
very
weird animal: “it is clear that the visitors found ‘the animal’ very unusual, and
quite unlike others that were known”
o was called ‘the animal
before mentioned’ for weeks in the journals!
§
interested
observers: “some at least of these visitors were themselves very unusual in
their keenness to record and describe fauna and flora and to make friendly
contact with the inhabitants of newly discovered lands.”
o Royal Society’s
instructions: “lastly, to form a Vocabulary of the
names given by the Natives, to the several things and places which come under
the Inspection of the Gentlemen”
Contact
issues
§
importance
of first/early contacts in establishing the loanword (e.g. kangaroo) and
its form (e.g. taboo)
o kangaroo from the Endeavour River
area; not known by the inhabitants of Port Jackson 18 years later when the
First Fleet arrived
§
there
were “many diverse and difficult” languages in Australia but this wasn’t known
until British settlement period
§
“kangaroo
and the words picked up from early contacts in the Port Jackson area form the
majority of the Aboriginal loan-words in Australian English”
·
cf.
North America, “where a substantial portion come from Algonquian languages,
those first encountered by white settlers (and where an early accepted loanword
like wig-wam would be used for similar lodges of deerskin in different
parts of the country without regard to local native names.”
o Tongan tabu was the
first form met with by Cook: the general Polynesian and Maori form is tapu
§
importance
of observers’ interest in and knowledge of local culture
o “Cook’s knowledge of
Polynesian life ... was deepened over his three voyages ... much greater than
his knowledge of New Holland”
o “the large numbers of
Polynesian words in the journals indicates that although the contact was – by
the standards of linguistic history – relatively brief it was quite intense.”
o taboo: Cook learned the
word during “a fairly extended stay in Tonga”
§
possibility
of misunderstanding at source when “signs” only medium of communication
o Banks very aware of this:
“he and his companions checked and compared their lists”
o easier with nouns
§
importance
of somebody’s knowledge of the local languages
o in Tahiti Cook had
companions “who spoke the language tolerable well” and could answer questions
§ I began with
asking questons relating to the several objects before us: if the Plantans
&c were for the Eatua; ... if they sacrificed men to the Eatua, he answered
Taata eno they did, that is bad men, first Teparrahy or beating them till they
were dead ... I asked if any Aree’s he said no and said these had Hogs &c
to give to the Eatua and again repeated Taata eno...”
o in Tonga, Cook had a
Tahitian Omai with him, and had made friends with a great chief (whom he took
to be ‘king’)
§
but
the most misunderstandings arose over “words involving ethical or religious
concepts”
o Cook: “if it is a Religious ceremoney we may not be able to
understand it, for the Misteries of most Religions are very dark and not easily
understud even by those who profess them.”
o when Cook learned taboo
on his second voyage, “it seems as if with the arrival of this new word he has
a key which will unlock at least some of the mysterious behaviour he meets”
Integration?
§
words
glossed? italicized?
o
“both sexes paint their bodys Tattow as it is
called in their language”
o “When dinner
came on table not one of my guests would sit down or eat a bit of any thing
that was there. Every one was Tabu, a word of a very comprehensive
meaning but in general signifies forbidden.”
§
spelling
variation?
o “Kangooroo or Kanguru”
o first Cook’s form tattow
“which probably represents the Tahitian diphthong, and then as tattoo
(by end C18th)
1769 COOK
Jrnl. 1st Voy.
July (1893) 93 This method of Tattowing I shall now describe...
As this is a painful operation, especially the Tattowing their Buttocks, it is
performed but once in their Life times. Ibid.
27 Nov. 164 Few of these people were Tattow'd or marked in the
face,..several had their Backsides Tattow'd.
1803 J.
BURNEY
Discov. S. Sea I.
ii. 61 They [natives of the Philippines] had the custom of
marking their bodies in the manner, which, to use a word lately adopted from
the language of a people more recently discovered, we call tattow.
§
adaptation
to English phonological or morphological rules?
o spelling tattoo
doesn’t preserve Tahitian diphthong
o morphological reanalysis:
§
e atua
‘a god’ appears as Eatua (cf. el lagarto ‘alligator’)
§
C18th
Otaheite for ‘Tahiti’
§
frequency
of use
o taboo: “It is noticeable how
frequently he uses the word once he has it. On shipboard, it seems to have
become thoroughly accepted.”
§
Back
in England, it seems to have worked its way into the standard vocabulary very
quickly ... It clearly answered a ‘need’, both in its more specialized sense
(it lived on as a technical anthropological term for the Polynesian concept,
but by the beginning of this century was being used as a convenient term to
describe similar customs in other parts of the world) – and in its popular one
– the distant echoes of a powerful, sacred prohibition have prevented it from
becoming a straightforward synonym for forbidden.”
1826 MISS MITFORD Village
Ser. II. 63 (Touchy Lady) The
mention of her neighbours is evidently taboo, since..she is in a state of
affront with nine-tenths of them.
§
conversion
o on shipboard it appears as a
past participle tabooed
o and in the compound taboo
man ‘priest’
·
compounding
o kangaroo ‘Australian’: kangaroo
apple, fly, grass
o kangaroo ‘involving kangaroos’: kangaroo
dog, kangaroo hunt, etc.
o kangaroo ‘like a kangaroo’: kangaroo
rat, kangaroo court (?)
·
figurative
use
o on shipboard Tahitian heiva
‘dance, amusement, dramatic performance’ applied on the third voyage to Cook’s
violent foot-stamping rages
§ “I
had a heiva of the old man”
§
“the old boy has been tipping a heiva to such and such a one”
o occasional uses of kangaroo
‘inhabitant of Australia, kind of chair, kind of bicycle’
o but otherwise most of the
other loanwords retain their specialized original meanings
§
...
“with the exception of the curious kangaroo-court”
Correcting Captain Cook
The
journals Cook kept were edited for publication (content and style)
·
Hawkesworth
(1), Douglas (2-3)
·
official
government-sponsored publication
·
shows
colonialism & prescriptivism in progress
·
shows
linguistic variation
o don’t expect to see PDE
standard English as a target
o tension between varieties
(e.g. nautical, literary)
§
“Zero
[plurals] tends to be used partly by people who are especially concerned with
the animals, partly when the animals are referred to in the mass as game.”
Noun
morphology
C:
for in the boat were Turtle, Fowls,
Birds, &c.
H:
for in the boat were turtle, fowls, ducks, parrots, paroquets, rice-birds,
monkies, and other articles,
C:
We hauled the Sene in several places in the River but caught only a few mullet [H: mullets]
C:
The Kangura are in the greatest
number for we seldom went into the Country without seeing some.
H:
There does not indeed seem to be many of any animal, except the kanguroo.
Verb
morphology
C:
but now I thought it more prudent to tack and spend the night under the Island
Mowtohora where I knowd [H: knew]
there was no danger.
C:
I found this point to lay [H: lie]
directly under the Tropick of Capricorn and for that reason call’d it by that
Name.
C:
and if by neglect he looseth [H:
loseth] any of his Arms or woorking tools, or suffers them to be stole [H: stolen]
C:
it is apparent from the Obserd Latitude that we have been drove [H: driven] 3 Leagues to leeward sence yesterday
C:
this Bay ... affords plenty of exceeding
good wood and water
H:
it affords plenty of exceeding good wood and water
C:
The land on the East side of the broad part of this River is tollerable high and hilly
H:
On the east side of the broad part of this river the land is tolerably
high and hilly
C:
for we saw them carried aCross the river in a Catamaran and walk leasurely off with the other natives.
(Banks:
the 3 boys .. nimbly ran and joind the party who walked leisurely away)
H: our three prisoners ... ran nimbly back and
joined their companions, who walked leisurely away