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<div>Reading through some unpublished manuscript materials by the
anthropologist Reo Fortune, I've run across a sobering story about
the consequences of improperly understood Tok Pisin:</div>
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<div>On p.233 of the original edition of Margaret Mead's<i> The
Mountain Arapesh I, An Importing Culture</i>, there is a photograph
of a Bukiyip ("Plains Arapesh") man. According to Fortune,
this man later "met with a violent end owing to an Australian
military patrols' poor knowledge of pidgin English. They asked him in
pidgin 'you no help him Japanese,' and he, vouching for his loyalty
and affirming the negative, answered 'yes,' and was shot without
futher interrogation."</div>
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<div>So getting it right can really matter!</div>
<div>Lise</div>
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