Saturday, April 12, 2008

Learning Tok Pisin

One of the things we would like to do before we leave the country is to learn a little Tok Pisin (the trade language of Papua New Guinea). Learning some language before we get to our Pacific Orientation Course will give us a head start, so we are playing number bingo and concentration games using animals and foods like those below.

Animals
mosquito-natnat
crocodile-pukpuk
cat-pusi
pig-pik

Foods
sweet potato-kaukau
cabbage-kapis
orange-switmuli
milk-susu

If you want to try and pronounce some of the words, remember that the orthography follows the International Phonetic Alphabet. So 'a' says 'ah', 'i' says 'ee', 'u' says 'oo', etc. For more information about Tok Pisin you can check out:

Radio Australia – Tok Pisin Service
http://www.abc.net.au/ra/tokpisin/

Thomas H. Slone's Homepage
http://members.tripod.com/~THSlone/index.html

Robert Eklund's Tok Pisin Homepage
http://roberteklund.info/

Tok Pisin
http://www.tok-pisin.com/

Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin

2 comments:

The Hibbard Family said...

the girls are going to absolutely love this! Olivia especially has wanted to know everything she can about the people you are going to be working with, so knowing some of the language you will be exposed to will be so exciting for her! YAY! Thanks for sharing!

Doug Hibbard said...

Papa bilong mipela
Yu stap long heven.
Nem bilong yu i mas i stap holi.
Kingdom bilong yu i mas i kam.
Strongim mipela long bihainim laik bilong yu long graun,
olsem ol i bihainim long heven.
Givim mipela kaikai inap long tude.
Pogivim rong bilong mipela,
olsem mipela i pogivim ol arapela i mekim rong long mipela.
Sambai long mipela long taim bilong traim.
Na rausim olgeta samting nogut long mipela.
Kingdom na strong na glori, em i bilong yu tasol oltaim oltaim.
Tru.