"'Ai yaa tákwa!' It was only in Zuni that the Savage could adequately express what he felt about the Arch-Community-Songster. 'Hani!' he added as an afterthought; and then (with what derisive ferocity!): 'Sons eso tse-na.' And he spat on the ground, as Popé might have done."
-Page 173
This quote is John yelling out of anger in his native language. The quote uses the vernacular language of John's old community. The author uses John's vernacular language here to show how completely angry John is at this moment. I'm sure these native words are some sort of cuss words that he had learned while living on the Reservation. Zuni is the language of the hateful words being screamed out by John. Bernard wants him John to come to his party and meet some important people, becuase they wanted to see the Savage. However, John was tired of being used as a way for Bernard to become popular and did not want to meet any more people interested in seeing him. Using John's vernacular language showed that the Savage was barbaric and had not come aquainted with this "civil" way-of-life yet.
Do you know what John is saying in Zuni? Just curious if it actually means anything or if Huxley made the words/laungauge up
ReplyDelete"Ai yaa tákwa"
"Háni"
"Sons éso tse-ná"
Did you get an answer? i am searching that too
Deleteupdate it's 2020 and still nobody knows radical
ReplyDeletelol I'm looking for this too. Sad that none of us know indigenous languages
ReplyDeleteIn 2006 Lennard M.van Rij, a scholar at Utrecht University included this passage as part of a thesis study on language and power. On page 97 of this work van Rij shows research into the translation of Huxley's "Zuni" phrases:
ReplyDelete“However, there are two differences between this antilanguage and the kind we find in the work of Di Donato and Steinbeck. The first one is that the author does not translate this language: the reader can only guess what the words mean, or if they even mean anything at all. Little has been written about the words of the Savage, and their meaning is wrapped in secrecy. Stanley Newman’s Zuñi dictionary (1958) does not provide the translation of any of the elements of “ai yaa tákwa”, and even the “elder Zuñi on staff” at the Zuñi tourism office in New Mexico struggles with the meaning of the words, according to the head of the tourism office, Tom Kennedy. (pers. com. April 25th 2006) It is “not totally clear”, Kennedy asserts, whether these words are “proper Zuñi”, although they are “somewhat translatable”. All this makes it very clear that the words are non-standard: they are not even Standard Zuñi.
The word “tákwa”, Kennedy explains, is almost certainly Zuñi (a judgment which is apparently hard to make if no complete and official written version of a language exists), meaning “one who does not know anything”. As for "Ai yaa", it “appears to mean ‘someone or a place far away’ - as on a mountain top”. Together, the unusual phrase would then mean: “He far away who does not know anything”, a description which, considering the distance between the Savage’s primary oral background and the Arch-Community-Songster’s secondary oral milieu, would fit the Songster. The meaning of the rest of the Zuñi quotation is slightly less clear: “Hani” could mean “younger person, such as brother or sister.” Perhaps we should interpret it as a way to belittle the addressed person. “Sons-éso tse-ná” would mean something like “now we are cold”, which might mean – although Tom Kennedy was unsure about the meaning of this sentence in the context of Huxley’s passage- that the Savage does not want to be the friend of Bernard Marx anymore. We cannot know for sure what the meaning of these words is, and perhaps we are not supposed to.”
Additionally, with a search on the internet (its' currently Spring of 2021) I found the following information from the website, "My Memory" by translated LABS (https://mymemory.translated.net/en/Swahili/English/ai-yaa-t%C3%A1kwa-h%C3%A1ni). This site states that the Huxley's language is Swahili (I cannot confirm this, as I am unfamiliar with both Zuni and Swahili). At this site the passage "Ai yaa tákwa!... Háni!... Sons ėso tse-ná" is translated into English as "You have the big gay, stupid epsilon boy."
Work Cited
van Rij, Lennard M. “Ai Yaa Tákwa!” Orality-Literacy Dynamics and the Novel 1929-1939. RMA Literary Studies, Utrecht, Summer 2006. (https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/20653)