Two words in the Miskito language which I believe to be etymologically related are tawa and tangni, "hair" and "flower," respectively. Why do I think that, and why should anyone care? There's no big deal really, I just enjoy reflecting on the way words are engendered like babies, whose genetic makeup is manifest in resemblance to their kin. It's like walking into a town and figuring out who's related to who just by looking at their faces. I especially rejoice when I find poetry in a language created by a people who had never even imagined the existence of classrooms. Writing about these things won't earn me any treasure in heaven or a tenured position at the university; it would be reward enough if perhaps somebody out there thinks it poignant that the sight of hair and flowers created associations and triggered the same neurons in the pleasure center of long dead Miskito people's brains.
1980. "Mairin pranika lika ai tawa." "The glory of a woman is her hair." I heard this Miskito truism a lot as a young man from the beginning of my sojourn in these parts, and watched it performed live by a host of girls who paraded daily past the health center in Brus Laguna where my eligible friend Scott Taylor and I were housed as Peace Corps volunteers. Repetition of this phrase cut a groove in the vinyl of my consciousness so that it could replay any time without my having to think about it.
In the summer of 1995 I was at my friend Jack Dyer's house house in La Ceiba, when I saw a book on his shelf entitled TANGWEERA, by Charles Napier Bell. It was a series of fond boyhood recollections written by a British man who grew up with one of the Miskito kings in the first half of the 19th century. I was curious about the title, because the author was obviously making reference to the people from the area around Sandy Bay, who today are commonly known as tawira--the "hairy ones." Tawira is also the name of one of the three principle dialects of the Miskito language. I asked to borrow the book; as I read it became clear that this man had learned to speak Miskito as a young child and must have been quite fluent. I was confident that the Miskito words he recorded in his book were done so faithfully, albeit with an orthographic system that was "English friendly" with respect to the vowels.
Tawira then, must have been Tangwira back in those days. Interesting. The suffix ira/kira means "possessing an abundance of," so the original lexeme for hair was tang. The morpheme wa denotes noun--dikwa, kuswa, etc. The early tawira word for hair, then, was tangwa; only later was it shortened to tawa.
As I said previously, the present word for flower is tangni. NI is a morpheme roughly translated "with, by means of" and as a suffix is generally used to denote adjective--pakni (deep), lalalni (slippery), twakni (thick), puputni (grey), etc. Tangni literally means tang-like, "having the quality of hair."
The original thinking of the creators of the Miskito language is revealed: a flower is to the plant as a woman's hair is to the person. The glory of a plant is its flower; a flower is beautiful as long black hair. Just because they threw lances at manatees and sea turtles, don't think that all primitive men got the girl by hitting her over the head with a club. Some hunters are tender, some have mad poetry. Just ask the Geico boys.
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