Samoan Language

A  few funny things about Samoan language. First of all, it’s really hard for me! I don’t know why. There are only 13 letters and there are few grammatical rules.  But most of the words consist of 80% vowels.  Some words (and even many sentences) are only vowels. How are you? Oa mai oe?  What about you? Aea oe?  Learning to speak Samoan has been one of the hardest things for me coming to my new village.  I felt really good about it in training, I felt like I was really picking it up and having good conversations with people in my training village. But when I came to my new village, it was like they were speaking Chinese and I had been learning a different language the whole time.  Part of the problem is that people skip lots of words when speaking (which happens in english a lot too, it’s like we kind of swallow sounds) and I get lost because it doesn’t sound like how I learned it.  However there are some things I understand pretty well, and some of them really make me laugh.

1. Ua e sau? Translation: Have you come? (it’s funny for a couple of reasons, but I’ll focus on one). This is said when you come home or maybe to some ones house who is expecting you after being gone.  My response is always “ioe.” “yes.”   But literally, everytime, it takes all of my self control to suppress the sarcasm in me and not say, “no, I’m still gone, but I’ll come soon.”

2. Eke alu I fea? Ae alu ai? Translation: Where are you going? This alone is not funny, but when in certain contexts it cracks me up. For example, when you are walking to the shower with your towel, “where are you going?” just seems so obvious it’s almost a joke. But it’s not. Or when you are walking towards the church, dressed in white, carrying your bible, and it’s 9:00 Sunday morning.  Or when you are running towards the bush with your tennis shoes and exercise clothes, sweating. 

3.  Moe umi. Translation: Long sleep.  People will say this to me when I come out of my room at 8:00 am to go exercise. It doesn’t matter than I usually have been up reading and getting ready for the day for an hour or so, or that I didn’t go to be till 1:00 the night before.  I hear “long sleep” almost every morning.  And then almost everyone in the village sleeps for a few hours in the middle of the day and I want to say, see this is why I like to sleep for 6-8 hours at night, so I don’t have to sleep for four in the middle of the day!

4. E ma’I mai le la. Translation: you will be sick from the sun. People say this to me when I go outside almost anytime the sun is out, but especially between the hours of 10 and 5. So pretty much the whole day. If I want to walk to the store, “you are going to be sick from the sun.” It’s funny.  Or when I’m going to exercise at 5:00, people exclaim, “La!” “sun!” as if I don’t know that the sun is there. 

5. Na e moe.  Leai, faitau se tusi. Pepelo. Translation: You slept. No, I read a book. Liar. I don’ t think this needs an explanation. Let’s just say that generally if you go in your room in the day, everyone thinks you are sleeping, see number 3.

6. Fa’alavelave. Translation: Too much trouble or Funeral (maybe it means something more along the lines of giving at a funeral, but the word seems interchangeable).  This is funny to me after going to a funeral the other day, during which multiple cows, atleast  a hundred boxes of corned beef and tin fish, tons of sodas, hundreds of dollars, ice cream, and a million pounds of food were given to the visiting family of the women that died. It was crazy to me. And it really was too much trouble, but just the fact that it’s the same word, well I really understood why even more.

7. Susu(hold the last u for a seconds) vs. susu (lets off the last u really fast). Translation: Wet vs. milk, suck, or breast. I have a lot of issues with this word.  I think it’s a little ridiculous those words are so close, but what are you gonna do?

8. Sole! Translation: Untitled boy in the village.  This one just makes me laugh because you hear it about five hundred times a day, for everything. Anytime someone is talking to a boy, sole. When you are playing volleyball with the girls and someone makes a mistake, sole. When something is kind of surprising, sole. I actually love this word, and try to incorporate in my vocabulary as much as humanly possibly, sometimes I just say it out of context because I like it so much.