Joseph in San Diego, California, says that during high school he lived in Hawaii, where he picked up the word bumbye which means sooner or later or eventually. It’s probably a version of by and by. For a closer look at the language of Hawaii, Grant recommends Da Word by Lee Tonouchi and Joseph recommends Pidgin to Da Max. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Hawaiian “Bumbye””
Hi there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha. This is Joseph Park from San Diego.
Hello, Joseph.
What can we do for you, Joseph?
In high school, I moved to Hawaii, and I was exposed to the local vernacular, Pigeon English.
And one day, I was sitting inside of a surf shop, and I heard somebody say to the owner, Bambai, I come back.
And I later discovered that the word Bambai means sooner or later.
And I thought it was just really, really interesting that they actually have a word that means sooner or later, and that’s how they used it.
But I never found out where the origin of that word was.
Did you ever see it written out?
Yes, I actually ended up looking it up to find what the word meant, and it’s spelled B-U-M-B-Y-E.
And where did you look it up?
Well, when I moved to Hawaii, someone had given me a little local, I guess their version of a dictionary.
It’s kind of called Pigeon to the Max.
And it kind of had the Hawaiian pigeon words with kind of the common English translations.
Is that two words, bumbai?
It’s usually written as one word.
One word.
Okay.
And sometimes spelled B-U-M-B-A-I.
You know what it is, though, Joseph?
It’s a contraction of by and by.
Huh.
And you should be able to slot by and by in most of the Hawaiian Creole sentences that you read or hear, and it will kind of more or less make sense.
Often it’s translated into regular English, mainstream English, as eventually or when some time has passed.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, so you might say, Bambai we go beach, meaning eventually we’ll go to the beach, or sooner or later we’ll go to the beach.
There’s a story called Da Word written in Hawaiian English by Lee Tanuchi, and he’s got this interesting little passage in there where he talks about the kind of variations on Bombay.
And one of the things he says that it kind of is the thing you tell kids, Bombay would be never, basically.
You leave them a little bit of hope, but actually you’re not really ever going to come through.
And the other one is because of.
So sometimes it’s a consequence of action.
So something happened, Bombay XYZ happened.
So A happened because Bombay B happened.
That’s interesting.
Yeah, I never knew that.
So pretty simple.
Yeah, yeah.
Like I said, by and by, I’m so much familiar with.
Never made that connection.
Yeah, there you go.
But there it is.
Well, thank you very much.
So what was that book again?
I think our listeners may want to know.
Yeah, it’s a hilarious read because it’s very tongue-in-cheek, but it’s Pigeon to the Max.
Pigeon to the Max.
All right. Thank you so much, Joseph. Call us again sometime, all right?
I will do so. Thank you very much.
Take care. Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.
