Everything you ever wanted to know about sewing machines (in Buru) but were afraid to ask

OK, there are so many exciting things I need to tell you about Buru — the Austronesian language spoken on the island of Buru in Eastern Indonesia that I started learning two weeks ago — that I don’t even know where to start.

But first, the good news.

Two weeks ago when I first set out to learn this language I had only three resources at my disposal:

1. a reference grammar by linguist Charles Grimes written in 1991

2. some audio recordings of Bible stories.

3. a sewing machine care manual that wasn’t even available online in its entirety.

Since then, things have changed for the better.

I have emailed the nice people at SIL International (SIL is a non-profit that has an archive of resources for endangered languages), and they have kindly sent me not only the entire pdf of the sewing machine manual but also a brochure about malaria, all in Buru.

I’m happy to report that I now know the names of all the sewing machine parts in Buru:

…AND I have learned that the best way to prevent malaria is to drink papaya leaf water (papai omon waen).¹

This is far more than I ever wanted to know about sewing machines or infectious diseases.

Most magically, the SIL people also sent me a PDF of the book of traditional stories called ‘Asu tu Menjangan’ tu Endohin Gerano fi di Fuk-Buru or “A Dog and a Deer’ and Other Stories from the Island of Buru.”²

I haven’t started reading the animal stories yet because I got them only a few days ago. Instead, I spent most of the last two weeks trying to learn Buru from an audio recording of the stories from the Old Testament (I’d promised that I’d be able to parse one minute of a story by the end of two weeks, and I like to keep my promises.)

Learning from Listening

Not gonna lie, it’s hard to learn the language just from listening to a story, without a dictionary, even if you know what the story is about.

But it was fun (the torturous kind). I thought I’d write down the steps here, for posterity.

For those of you who also enjoy this sort of thing and want to go and figure it out on your own, I’m warning you that the following few paragraphs include SPOILERS.

Step 1

Listen to the story a thousand times. Not just this story but a few other ones to see if you notice patterns.

On the first few listens all I figured out was

1. that the word tu means ‘and’

2. anamhana means ‘man’ and anafina ‘woman.’

3. The word bara came up a lot in the story “Ten Commandments”, so I figured it must mean “Don’t.”

4. the numbers of 1 to 40. They say ‘gambar paa’, gambar lima, gambar ne, gambar pito… and so on… at the beginning of every story, so I figured gambar means ‘story’ and whatever follows is the number.

5. The word oplatala came up a lot and I was like what the heck can it mean?? Then I remembered that when I was in high school (where Tanakh — aka the Old Testament — is a compulsory subject) we discussed how the word ‘God’ was the most frequent word in the book of Genesis. So there.

Step 2

Decide that it’s very hard to notice patterns from just listening. Type the whole thing up even if you don’t understand what you’re typing.

Here is the first type-up of the story about Adam and Eve. At this point, I didn’t even know where the boundaries between words were.

Step 3

Keep listening to the story, and jumping between the Gibberish you’ve typed up and random sections of the reference grammar hoping that the Gibberish will slowly mold into words.

It did. Well, most of it. I am still not certain about the meaning of some words but I got most of the story down. Yay.

I’m including the first few lines of the final type-up here, just so you can see how exciting it is when things start making sense.

Two exciting things about the Buru language

There are way too many exciting things in Buru to fit in one post, so I’ll just tell you about two of them. Everything I’m telling you here I have learned from Grimes’ book, or first encountered ‘in the wild’ and then confirmed in Grimes.

Reduplication

Like many other Austronesian languages, Buru does something called reduplication: it doubles a part of the word or the whole word to change the meaning. English does it too sometimes. For example, if you want to stress how imporant something is you might repeat the word ‘very’ and say “It is very very important.”

In English, this is an exception, but in Buru reduplication is the norm, and is used to signal a change in meaning of some kind.

For example, Da oli means ‘He returned’ and Da oli-oli where you repeat the word oli ‘return’ means ‘he kept coming back.’

Waqu-n di boti means ‘This cloth is white’ but Waqu-n di bot-boti means ‘This cloth is extremely white.’

How Buru talks about time

Then there is the magical way that Buru talks about time.

In Buru, the 24-cycle begins with the onset of darkness. That’s how it is in Judaism, too, by the way: the day is thought to begin in the evening. So on Friday evening people wish each other ‘Shabbat Shalom’ and on Saturday evening, at dusk, even though it’s technically still Saturday, Shabbat is over, stores reopen and people say to each other shavua tov ‘have a good week.'

By the way, it is based on the story of creation in the book of Genesis which goes: "It was night, and it was day – day one” implying that the day begins at night.

Beto in Buru means 'night’ and lea means ‘sun’ or ‘day’, but the word beto is used to count the days.

To ask ‘how many days?” you say beto-n pila? — i.e. literally ‘how many nights?’

Here are a few of my favorite time expressions in Buru. These are used in addition to or instead of the regular ‘o-clock’ which was introduced, like the writing system, by the Europeans.

torowahe koi-t — literally means ‘the taboo hour’ and refers to the “period of about an hour (approx 8-9 pm) when full darkness is setting in when evil spirits are at their peak activity.”

beto haa-t — means ‘big night’ and refers to the period from around 9 pm to 3 am.

ewasu kala-k — literally ‘bird call’ is from 2 am to 4 am

blola lea — literally “near sun” is anywhere from around 3 am until the first light

prede-predek — 'beginning to get light’ / “light enough to see hair on forearm” (!!)³

moda-n — literally ‘wind’ but means 'afternoon' (from around 3 pm until sundown)

lea sogo — “sun cross into water” 'sundown'

mod-moda-n — literally means ‘wind-wind’ but refers to 'late afternoon.'

I love these expressions so much that I’m planning to adopt some of them.

This is a good time to point out that Buru is one of the many languages that is probably not going to survive into the next generation. A little-known fact is that almost half of the 7000 languages spoken today are endangered, and many will be extinct by the end of the century.

Does it matter? I mean, doesn’t it matter that in a generation or two nobody on planet Earth will say “Let’s meet at my house tomorrow morning, as soon as we can see hairs on our forearms?”

This is a much bigger question than I can answer here, but yes it matters.

This is why from now on whenever I’m scheduling a meeting with someone early in the morning, I’m planning to tell them to come when it’s light enough so they can see hair on their forearm.

It’s a little bit risky as I can easily imagine someone very hairy showing up at my house at 5 am. But I’m willing to take this risk.

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If you’re a writer on Substack, consider recommending Friends with Words to your readers (go to Dashboard>Settings>Publication details>Recommend other publications on Substack). I’ve set out to learn 12 languages in 12 months and to find out the names of sewing machine parts in various endangered languages.

1. The malaria brochure is bilingual in Indonesian and Buru which is great because I can first translate the Indonesian in Google Translate and then try to figure out how it all adds up in Buru.

2. This scarcity of resources, of course, stems from the fact that Buru, like most of the world’s languages, did not have a written tradition, until the arrival of Dutch missionaries early in the 20th century.

3. I have no idea where this meaning comes from. I don’t see the word ‘forearm’ or ‘hair’ in this phrase. Grimes actually says that prede means ‘dark’ but I’m just going to roll with this and take his word for it.