JapanNewbie

Japan and Tanzania joined by Peppers

Posted on 15. Jun, 2009 @ 4:07 pm by harvey in Culture, Language Views: 529

As you may or may not know, I’m actually now in Tanzania doing an internship. I’ll be here until August. I’ve picked up a few words and phrases in Swahili (really, just a few) and recently came across something pretty interesting.

The word for a “chili” or “pepper” in Swahili is “pilipili.”

In Japanese the phrase 「ぴりぴり」is a gitaigo 擬態語 to describe that tingly feeling you get in your mouth after you have eaten something spicy, like a hot pepper.

Is this just a random coincidence? I tweeted this observation and within a few minutes @gdharbin sent me a few valuable response tweets. Explaining that it comes from the Portuguese trading ships. Check out this Wikipedia link on Piri piri.

Seems like a likely story to me. As you may know, the reason that “bread” in Japanese is パン (pan), which also means “bread” in Spanish/Portuguese is due to those Portuguese trading ships as well.

Fun huh?

On a side note, another interesting thing about Tanzania that I have noticed is that Tanzanians constantly tell foreigners about how easy their language is to learn. They’ll go out of their way to make sure that you at least know the basic greetings in Swahili, and then will use them with you whenever they get a chance. Whenever my wife or I use Swahili the locals smile and gladly respond in Swahili to keep the conversation going as long as they can until it eventually breaks down and becomes English (due to our pitiful Swahili skills). After fumbling around in Swahili I frequently am asked, “how long have you been in Tanzania? Don’t worry, just learn a few words everyday and you can speak good Swahili.”

In Japan it was pretty different. I noticed that people would frequently be amazed at my ability to speak Japanese because, 日本語って難しいでしょう？どうやって覚えたの？！ Japanese is difficult isn’t it?? How did you learn it?! Unlike the Tanzanians the Japanese seemed to think that their language was impossible for anyone other than Japanese to figure out.

Is Japanese really more difficult than Swahili? Perhaps. The writing system is more difficult for Westerners for sure – Swahili is written using the roman alphabet so there are no new characters to learn. Swahili is also very easy to pronounce, it’s read almost exactly like Japanese romaji. I have only studied Swahili for a tiny bit of time, but I can “read” anything aloud even if I don’t know what it means. It takes many years of study to be able to do that in Japanese…

But Swahili isn’t a cake walk. They have this weird thing called “noun classes” or something where the noun changes based on how many there are and the words preceding it and all this other stuff… But how they change depends on the class the noun is in… Like table is meza… and tables is meza… but person is mengi and people is wengi… but tree is mti while trees is miti… pipe is kiko but pipes is viko… And there are more variations. To me, for one, that’s crazy difficult.

I don’t know… There is something I like about the positive attitude Tanzanians have towards the capability of foreigners to learn their language. It’s very encouraging.

Any thoughts on this?

- Harvey

Tags: japanese, Language, swahili