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Understandings on Tanna came about so often like the slow filtration of rainwater through rock. And nowhere did this happen more than in the realm of language. It was the white man’s desire to trade in sea-slugs – known by the French as bêche-de-mer – that had first necessitated the invention of a lingua franca pidgin, and Bislama, pronounced BISH-la-ma, became its name. The word is a pidgin form of ‘Beach-La-Mer’, itself a corruption of ‘bêche-de-mer’. And so many of Bislama’s terms sounded utterly foreign, until they’d been in my mouth long enough to lose the unfamiliar tang of Tanna. ‘Like’, for instance, was ‘olsem’ – from ‘all a same’. ‘What’ was ‘wanem’ – ‘what name’. And ‘just’ – I liked this best – was rendered in Bislama as ‘nomo’, which for me always evoked the scene of some hard-bitten sea-slug buyer bargaining down to just a shilling, no more.
It was a simple language, encrusted with Melanesian habits of pronunciation, designed for commerce and work. Western visitors were tickled by terms like ‘rubba belong fak-fak’ for ‘condom’ and ‘bugarup’ for ‘broken’. Then there was the Olympian ‘bilak-bokis-we-i-gat-bilak-tut-mo-i-gat-waet–tut-sipos-yu-kilim-em-i-sing-aot’, which ensured nobody in the archipelago would ever bother referring to a piano, let alone shipping one in. But I often wondered if the stripped-down concepts of Bislama contributed to the disdainful Western view of the people who used it. Their language sounded charming, but daft, child-like even – just like the Prince Philip cult. No wonder people had trouble taking it seriously.
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