Languagle #61: Samoan
E le pu se tino i upu
"Words don't break the body."
What it means
Words can't hurt you the way blows can, so there is no need to be wounded by insults. The Samoan counterpart to 'sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me'.
How to say it
eh leh POO seh TEE-no ee OO-poo
Samoan stresses the second-to-last syllable. Every vowel is said clearly, as in Spanish.
Word by word
- E le eh leh: does not (le, not)
- pu poo: pierce, break through
- se tino seh TEE-no: a body
- i upu ee OO-poo: with words
Where it was written down
A traditional proverb, in Samoan an alagāʻupu, passed down by word of mouth. It was recorded in Rev. George Pratt's Samoan dictionary of 1862, the first Samoan dictionary.
Similar sayings
- Hawaiian: I ka ʻōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo nō ka make. In speech there is life; in speech there is death. Another Polynesian language takes the opposite view. (Languagle #32)
How to recognise Samoan
Samoan uses only fourteen letters plus a glottal-stop mark (ʻ), and every word ends in a vowel. Its g is said 'ng', and it uses s, f, t and v, which Hawaiian doesn't. Hawaiian has k, h and w instead. Māori has wh and ng, and Tongan uses ng and h. Long vowels in Samoan carry a line on top, as in ā.
About the Samoan language
Samoan is a Polynesian language, part of the Austronesian family, spoken by around half a million people in Samoa and American Samoa, where it is official alongside English, and in large communities in New Zealand, Australia and the United States. It has a special respectful vocabulary used when speaking to or about chiefs and in formal speeches. It is written in the Latin alphabet, where the letter g stands for the 'ng' sound in 'sing'.