Issue # 1: Kaur
Dear member,
Thank you for Joining our new "Tok Pisin Jokes-PNG" group.
As I write we now have over 300 members and the group is still growing.
Our language Tok Pisin is a growing language, but at the same time it is losing some of its indigenous flavour in favour of newer English, technological, economical and modern jargon terms.
I have decided to post every now and then a post where I shall present a word that I think will soon disappear from Tok Pisin or maybe a new word that seems to be appearing in the street and market language of everyday Tok Pisin.
We all know that Tok Pisin is spoken at many levels and circles in Papua New Guinea and that the nurses at an emergency or labour ward in a hospital would be different from the Tok Pisin that would be spoken by factory workers at Atlas Steel or in a village council meeting at Sipaia in Lae. So there are specialist vocabularies that never leave the circle in which those terms are used. Buts that's PNG.
The word I want to preset today is: "Kaur"
Kaur in Father Mihalic's dictionary is translated as: (Gaz) a very hard and thick kind of bamboo used for rafters of houses as well as for combs and spear points.
The word we mainly use nowadays for bamboo is the word of Malaysian origin: "mambu" and some people prefer to say "bambu" or "bembu". I have not heard "kaur" used in everyday tokpisin in Papua New Guinea so I think it will be one of the words that has disappeared from our vocabulary.
If you would like more of this Tok Pisin words and phrases presentation, please reply and let me know.
Best Martin