[Mihalic] 'Eating water' in Tok Pisin?

[Michael Goddard]

I've never heard (Western Highlands, and around Moresby)  'kaikai/kaikaim' used in relation to anything which is unequivocally liquid.
I have heard it used in many circumstances when any kind of consumption is implied: eg in relation to money and other resources, and references to oral sex.

re 'dring', 'dringim' and transitivity:
'dring' usually  intransitive, but NB in a phrase like 'I'd like a drink of water', when no specific water is referred to, I've heard,  'mi laik dring wara'. But when "i'd like to drink the/this/that water" is intended, it is usually 'dringim'.
Also the single word imperative, e.g. mother to child can be 'dring' but is often 'Dringim' ["drink (it)!"]

mg

>>> Stuart Robinson <Stuart.Robinson at mpi.nl> 08/14/06 8:02 pm >>>
The verb kaikaim is not used with objects denoting liquids, as far as I
know from my (admittedly limited) experience w/ Tok Pisin in Bougainville.
Also, I searched a 800K-word corpus of Stori Tumbuna columns from the
Wantok newspaper for 'kaikaim' followed by 'wara' (using a simple regular
expression search on 'kaikaim.*wara') and there were no instances of
'wara' occuring as an object of 'kaikaim'. I did a similar search on
'dringim' and 'wara' and found quite a few instances (50, most of which
had 'wara' as an object of 'dringim'). The Stori Tumbuan columns consist
of folk tales mailed in from various parts of PNG, so they provide a
sampling of regional varation. Therefore, I'd say that the Tok Pisin verb
'kaikaim' is more like the English term 'to eat' than 'to ingest'--i.e.,
has stricter semantic categorization of the theme/patient. Of course, it'd
be interesting to know whether there aren't regional variants (due to
substrate influence?) where 'kaikaim' is used more like an ingest-type
verb than an eat-type verb.

-Stuart

P.S. There is a supposedly a semantic difference between the transitive
usage of kaikai and kaikaim, where the former means 'to gnaw, chew, or
bite' and the latter means 'to eat'. So, you'd want to know whether you
could have 'kaikai wara' OR 'kaikaim wara'.

Following up on this a bit, I did a regular expression search on the
corpus for 'bit(e|ten|ing)' (i.e., 'bite', 'bitten', and 'biting') and got
35 matches. In most cases, the the lexeme bite was used as a translation
for 'kaikai', not 'kaikaim'. But there are exceptions. In about 11
sentences, 'kaikaim' would be translated as 'bite' rather than 'to eat' in
English--e.g.,

'Mi kol na mi laik mekim paia tasol dok bilong yu i kaikaim mi na yu
mas pasim dok bilong yu.' [S. Highlands, 1977]

I'm not sure if this is a regional thing, and if so what explains it.

A similar search for 'chew(ing|ed)?' gives 106 matches. I haven't follow
up on these as carefully, but it looks like most of these are about
chewing betel nut, in which case it is 'kaikai buai' and not 'kaikaim
buai'. I did, however, find one instance of 'kaikaim' used with 'kambang':

'Turun i kaikaim dispela kambang, Heahun i givim em na em i lukim buai i
ret moa.' [Unknown, 1984]

This may actually be a subtle semantic distinction. Whereas 'buai' isn't
completely consumed (it is chewed and than spat out), the little piece of
the 'kambang' that is bitten off is in fact completely consumed. So if the
relevant semantic dimension is degree of consumption, then 'kaikaim
kambang' would be more appropriate for 'kambang' than 'buai'.

Finally, I'm not sure whether there is a parallel distintion between the
transitive use of 'dring' and 'dringim'. Does anybody know? If I find the
time, I'll try to foll up by looking at the corpus.

> I am now writing a chapter on Semantics, for my Manambu grammar. Manambu
> has one word, ke-, which covers eating, drinking (and also smoking)-
> similarly to Kwoma a 'ingest' in Ross Bowden's dictionary. And I have
> been able to find a similar type of polysemy in almost every Ndu
> language (with the exception of Ngala (also known as Gala) and Yelogu).
>
> What struck me in a word list of Boikin (Yengoru dialect), compiled by
> A. Freudenburg (1975; SIL archives), was a Tok Pisin equivalent of the
> English verb 'drink': this was given as kaikaim wara.
>
> Does it make any sense to any of you? Have you ever heard this used?
> Could this reflect some regional variety?
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