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Rambling nor’westers caress sea-lion excursions.
True story, every word in that sentence was introduced to English by the pirate William Dampier. Dampier (1652-1715) was a sea captain, navigator, explorer, cartographer, scientific observer and buccaneer who circumnavigated the world three times.
He is cited more than 1,000 times in the Oxford English Dictionary, also introducing into English the words avocado, barbecue, breadfruit, cashew, chopsticks, petrel, posse, settlement, snapper, soysauce, stilts (as in house supports), subsistence (as in farming), sub-species, swampy, thunder-cloud, (to make) snug and tortilla.
As a travel-writer alone, his name deserves to be known wherever our language is spoken. Dampier is credited with introducing the word ‘caress’ only as a verb. It had been used in print in English as a noun some 86 years earlier. [ed. note: In some cases (for example ‘petrel’) something vaguely like the word had been in use earlier, but Dampier is the first to use the modern spelling.] Also. Did you know? William Dampier was the person who rescued the real Robinson Crusoe – Alexander Selkirk. Dampier’s account of this and his travels informed the world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Shipwrecked and Treasure Island. Long John Silver also, turns out was real a pirate.
“Didn’t He Ramble, didn’t he ramble” Jelly Roll Morton
http://willem-dampier.biography.ms
‘Indiana University anthropologist Daniel Suslak is compiling a dictionary of Ayapaneco, an indigenous language of Mexico that has only two remaining fluent speakers.
Unfortunately, the two aren’t speaking to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 meters apart in the southern state of Tabasco, but “they don’t have a lot in common,” Suslak told the Guardian in April.
Segovia can be “a little prickly,” and Velazquez is “more stoic” and rarely leaves his home. Without their cooperation, Ayapaneco may die out altogether. “When I was a boy everybody spoke it,” Segovia said. “It’s disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me.”’
Mexican Language Ayapaneco Dying Out
‘This wooden seat known as a ‘duho’ was sculpted by a Taino artisan. The Taino were one of the pre-European, native peoples of the Caribbean It is carved in the shape of an ancestor spirit known as a cemi.
Duhos were used to communicate with the spirit world. A Taino chief would sit in his duho and then snort psychedelic snuff made from the seeds of the cohoba tree. They would then ask the spirits for advice on the future, such as whether to go to war. This four legged wooden stool, or duho, with its long shape and wide-eyed face probably belonged to a chief, or “cacique” of the Taino people of the Caribbean.
Taino was a term used to describe a spectrum of peoples who originated in South America and who populated the whole region, including Cuba, Hispaniola, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. What was Taino society like? Before the arrival of Europeans, the Caribbean was home to two main ethnic groups – the Taino and the Caribs. The Taino generally lived in the northern islands including Cuba, Jamaica and the Bahamas, while the Caribs lived in the southern islands. The Taino were farmers who lived in highly-organised societies, divided into nobles and commoners. They were ruled by both male and female chiefs. Only the chief or an important visitor could sit in a duho. Christopher Columbus was given this honour when he arrived in the Caribbean in 1492.
Some Taino words survive as modern Spanish and English words including hurricane, barbecue, hammock, canoe and tobacco.’
