MAMIHLAPINATAPAIS: a look shared by two people each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but that neither will start
What an awesome word, right? It's a look that we've all shared with someone or other in the past. There's a kind of delicious helplessness in it.
A Facebook friend commented on the word, saying she was sure I was making it up. I'm not, but I know, it sounds made up. And it might be.
Mamihlapinatapais is from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego. Currently it is spoken by ONE PERSON. So I guess it's pretty hard to verify. She could be making it up. If I were the last speaker of a language, you can bet your bottom dollar I would insert a few of my own coinages into the dictionaries that linguists would be franctically writing.
Which brings me to my purpose here. I propose that we adopt this word, "mamihlapinatapais." But we could never remember all of those syllables. Let's shorten it, and let's make the spelling more English-like while keeping the original sound.**
Mamislap. (pronounced MAH-mee-shlap)
We could use it as a noun or a verb. Examples:
- In the season finale, Brenda and Kevin shared a wistful mamislap, but the writers have yet again delayed the beginning of their relationship. Oh the angst!
- It only took us an hour of mamislapping, but we finally kissed each other good night.
- There's no contest; in a choice between a ten-second mamislap with Charlize Theron or a night with Britney Spears? Mamislap with Charlize, hands down.
*(I learned it from Futility Closet)
**From Reference.com:
The word consists of prefix ma(m)- reflexive/passive (second m before roots beginning with a vowel), root ihlapi (hl pronounced as /ɬ/, though in Yahgan it has also been described as similar to sl) which means to be at a loss as to what to do next, followed by stative suffix -n- and achievement suffix -at(a), and finally dual -apai, which in composition with ma(m)- has a reciprocal sense.
1 comment:
Hi- I'm the one who wrote the linguistic analysis of the word. I've been studying Yahgan for ten years. I'm not sure that the last speaker, Cristina Calderon, even KNOWS this word- she speaks a dialect different from the one of the original dictionary manuscripts, which I have copies of. The word dates from at least as far back as the late 1870's (many of the resources have been lost due to negligence and war).
Anyway, you might get away with mamislap in English, but then you'd be cutting right across actual affixes or ignoring others. Gotta keep islupi (the -up- as in Eng. 'up', but closer- the u has something of an r-like quality in many cases. Something like 'is slurpy', but the y is really short i, not long or y.
You *could* possibly ditch the mam- and the -a:pai by using hungumbai, which means 'each other' (notice though that it contains the -pai).
Actually Yahgan has some even more interesting words- the guy who zeroed in on this one never cracked the published dictionary further than the preface and introduction pages.
The language is actually filled to the gills with terms dealing with mental states and emotions- much more than in English. It distinguishes, for instance, at least three different sorts of jealousy (sexual, material, and social status). By comparison, English speakers seem tongue-tied.
Some of the most interesting terms deal with feuds and vengeance- how close one is to the offending or aggrieved party, and thus how obligated one was to participate in exacting justice or defense, how many relatives one has to defend one, and so on.
There are many different kinship terms, including for when connecting relatives are dead, by different means (so if your parents drowned, you'd get a different moniker than if you were shot dead with arrows).
This sort of expansion of lexical semantic domains is often seen when material and technical resources are less available or advanced. The brain has to do something with itself, so it expands the social.
Anyway, come visit the Yahgan discussion list (tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/waata_chis
waata chis is 'old news'....
Jess Tauber
phonosemantics@earthlink.net
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