Carsten Levisen

Salt Water Words: Insulting Etymologies in the Black Pacific 

This paper studies the lexico-semantics of “saltwater words”, i.e. words which are conceptually based on, or elaborated from, maritime discourse. With a case study on Bislama, a South Pacific creole spoken in Vanuatu, the paper explores the interrelatedness between salt water worlds, and salt water words, and the interface between language ideology, maritime ethnogeography, and colonial history. Theoretically, the paper relies on ‘Postcolonial Semantics’ (Levisen and Jogie 2015; Levisen, Sippola and Aragón 2016; Levisen and Priestley 2017), an approach to meaning-making that combines methods and insights from (i) cultural-cognitive semantics (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2014) and (ii) the emerging interdiscipline of postcolonial linguistics (Stolz, Warnke & Schmidt-Brücken 2016).

The paper has three parts. First, a short overview of the Bislama conceptual universe is provided, focusing on the local concepts of solwata ‘the sea, saltwater’ and lanwis ‘language, vernacular languages’. The second part presents an in-depth study of the local concept of bislama and its contemporary and historical polysemy patterns. Much has already been said about the structural-linguistic perspectives underlying the shift from the historical “Beach-La-Mar-English” to contemporary “Bislama” (see e.g. Crowley 1990), but very little has been said about contemporary semantics and local language ideologies (but see Vandeputte-Tavo 2013, Levisen 2017). Beach-la -mar, (and the pseudo-French bêche-de-mere), was a word for a marine animal, conceptualized in European languages as ‘sea cucumbers’, ‘sea sausages’, or similar. In era-colonial times, this creature was known for its aphrodisiac qualities, and its perfect blandness in terms of taste, both of which made it a sought-after product on the Chinese market. In contemporary Black Pacific discourse, the sea-slug is, if noticed at all by speakers, conceptualized as olgeta sofsof samtia ‘those soft things’, and they are thought of as disgusting, or even unclean. Thus, the link between bislama as a sea-slug, and bislama as a language is a polysemy of the past, but occasionally this semantic pathway is being re-established, through “etymological knowledge”, which in turn creates a collision between meaning as lexico-semantics and meaning as encyclopedic knowledge. The final part of the paper explores “etymology as an insult”, and the contradictory discursive affordances that etymologies allow when they are brought back from the past. This part explores the language ideologies involved in the re-introduction of past polysemies, and how forgotten semantic pathway can be re-established, in ways which (re-)enable colonial logic, and the prevailing sense of ambivalence associated with being a speaker of Bislama.