Languagle #55: Marshallese
Je dur lomödo im täbare ak buruen armij je bane
Je dur lomodo im tabare ak buruen armij je bane
"We fathom the sea and reach its bottom, but not the human heart."
What it means
You can measure the ocean, sail it, sound it, find the bottom of it. You cannot do the same to a person. The word translated "heart" is literally the throat, which is where Marshallese places the seat of feeling.
Where it comes from
Written down in 1914 by August Erdland, a German missionary who lived in the Marshall Islands and recorded more than twenty Marshallese proverbs in a book about the islands’ life, customs and language. This is the fifteenth of them. The saying itself is far older and has no author, Erdland was the first person to put it on paper.
Where it was written down
Written down by the German missionary August Erdland in his 1914 book on the Marshall Islands, Die Marshall-Insulaner. The spelling is his, from before modern Marshallese spelling.
Worth knowing
This is spelled the way Erdland wrote it in 1914, which is not how Marshallese is written today. It has been kept exactly as he recorded it rather than modernised: no one has published this proverb in the modern spelling since, so updating it would mean guessing.
How to recognise Marshallese
Modern Marshallese spelling uses letters with marks under or over consonants as well as vowels: ļ, m̧, ņ, n̄, o̧, ā, ō and ū. A cedilla under an m or an l is a very rare sight, and a strong clue. This proverb comes from a book printed in 1914, so it uses an older spelling with ä and ö instead.
About the Marshallese language
Marshallese is a Micronesian language spoken by around 50,000 people in the Marshall Islands and in communities in the United States. The Marshall Islands are a nation of low coral atolls scattered across the central Pacific, and Marshallese navigators traditionally read ocean swells, charting them with stick charts made from palm ribs and shells. Marshallese is written in the Latin alphabet with a few letters of its own.
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