olomo
- (v.) to walk
- (n.) walker
- (n.) walk
- (adj.) walking
Olomo iu paleumi…
“Walking through the city…”
Notes: A decidedly bizarre song, but still one of Iron Maiden’s best. Here at number 8 we have…
Number 8
“Prowler”
Iron Maiden (1980)
So if you click that link and listen to this song, you might find yourself thinking, “Is this song about a…flasher?” If so, you would be right. It is, indeed, a song about a creepy flasher. It doesn’t seem like a very metal subject for a song, yet the song itself is a short, simple sonic attack. This is the first song on Iron Maiden’s first album, and it effectively announces them to the world.
Also, I should make it clear that when I select this song at number eight, it’s the song I’m selecting, not necessarily the performance I linked to up there. Iron Maiden’s first two albums featured their original lead singer, Paul Di’Anno, and while he’s…good, he’s no Bruce Dickinson. In 1988, Iron Maiden rerecorded the song “Prowler” with Bruce Dickinson on vocals to serve as a B-side for their single “The Evil That Men Do”, calling it “Prowler ’88″. That’s actually the first version of the song I heard, and it is incredible. They capture that hollow, street-side feel, and Bruce Dickinson’s vocals are a fivefold improvement over the original.
Speaking of the lyrics and this word, I’m not quite sure what the subject of the first line is supposed to be. The lyrics go “Walking through the city / Looking oh so pretty / I just got to find my way”. I think from context, one can assume that the subject must be some woman, but upon listening to it, I always assumed it referred to the narrator. I’ve left it without a pronoun in the Kamakawi translation, but the sentence looks naked… Perhaps that was their intent. (That is, back in 1980 they foresaw my birth and the creation of Kamakawi, and they crafted these lyrics to make their Kamakawi translation suggestive.)
The iku for olomo is the little man you see in words like hopoko with the “ground” determinative beneath him (it’s like he’s walking! 
). I think it’s a nice word for “walk” (extended, it kind of rolls along).
Speaking of conlanging, on the Conlang List we were recently talking about (for the second time in nine years!) path and manner language (or satellite-framed and verb-framed languages). Most languages feature a bit of both, but you can basically categorize natural languages as one or the other. English, for example, is a satellite-framed language. In English, you can say things like the following:
- I walked into the room.
- I slumped into the room.
- I trudged into the room.
- I tripped into the room.
- I fell into the room.
- I ran into the room.
And so forth. You can do pretty much anything you want, and the thing that indicates that one entered the room is the preposition “into”. That is, it’s a satellite element that indicates motion from one thing to another, and the verb indicates the manner (how it was done). You can also do it the other way (e.g. “I entered the run running”), but it’s less English-like to do so. In Spanish, on the other hand, that’s the only way you can do it (for the most part). In Spanish, the motion must be indicated on the verb, and the manner is indicated with a gerund (if at all).
One might wonder, then, what type of a language is Kamakawi? Turns out, it’s both. However, unlike Esperanto, which is kind of a train wreck, there’s an explanation for why Kamakawi is the way it is—and this example sentence is a nice illustration.
In Kamakawi, all prepositions (save one) were originally verbs. In addition, all verbs were originally intransitive. The transitive construction one sees today is a result of a serial verb construction. So in old Kamakawi there would be something like this:
Ka hava ei ka i kolata.
/PAST eat 1SG PAST exist pineapple/
“I ate and it was the pineapple (that I ate).”
In the past, there was a kind of implicature that strung transitive clauses together (and it’s what led to the development of the subject status markers), and that led to the development of transitive verbs with the former verb i becoming an object marker. That reanalysis stopped at the level of the transitive verb, though, so the serial construction persists in ditransitive clauses.
Now let’s jump to the creation of prepositions. Originally, prepositions were simply verbs—and they still are, in fact (Ae ei ie pale, “I’m in the house”, where ae is a verb meaning “to be inside”). This meant that old Kamakawi was a verb-framed language, e.g.:
A iu ei a i puka.
/PRES go.through 1SG PRES exist door/
“I go through and it is the door (that I go through).”
Of course, you could also have what, I think, are rather standard serial constructions like the following:
A olomo ei a iu ei a i puka.
/PRES walk 1SG PRES go.through 1SG PRES exist door/
“I walk and I go through and it is the door (that I go through).”
With the development of the subject status system (and the solidification of i as an object marker), though, that could be simplified as follows:
A olomo ei e iu i puka.
/NEW.SBJ walk 1SG SAME.SBJ go.through OBJ door/
“I walk and go through the door.”
We’ll call this Middle Kamakawi. Then, though, the same reanalysis that applied to the existential verb i applied to the other locational verbs, and you get the modern phrasing:
A olomo ei iu ie puka.
/NEW.SBJ walk 1SG go.through OBJ.DEF door/
“I go through the door.”
Thus, Kamakawi adopted a satellite-framed system while retaining its initial verb-framed system, and the two coexist quite happily.
Well, that turned into a nice little mini-historical overview! Fun. Up next, one of my favorite Iron Maiden songs (just like the previous three, and the six that follow tomorrow’s).
). It’s been a lot of fun learning about Kēlen over the past…wow, almost a year! But there’s a special reason to tune into Sylvia’s blog now.
There we go.
