My great grandmother Emelina, a simmering, dark-haired Central American beauty, emigrated from El Salvador before settling down in the San Francisco Bay Area. Eventually she met my great grandfather Lynn, a handsome, blue-eyed Indiana man from Muncie, of German-English extraction and they would start a family, and among their children, my grandmother Abbie Gail. Great grandma was half-Italian. Her father Narcisso had emigrated from Naples, Italy aiming to gain citizenship in America, the United States of. As the story goes, how my grandmother Abbie related it, Narcisso boarded the wrong boat and found himself in San Salvador, El Salvador, America Centro, instead. Apparently he found life there satisfactory enough and never sought to remedy his mistake. The chances are high that he fell in love with an indigenous girl of indigenous Pipil ancestry, and the rest is history.
I've been engaged in investigating my ancestry for nearly 22 years now. This never really interested me as a young man, however, I picked up the torch with the passing of my aunt, my mother's sister, as a means of fulfilling a promise I had made to her in researching our Ali'i Hawaiian ancestry and its links to both Hale Moana and Hale Kāmehameha. Around the same time, my father began to share with me information regarding our Sāmoan ancestry, with ties to the Tu'i Manu'a lineage, and a number of legendary heroes. Numbering among these heroes: Gēgē, Chief Fānene and his sons, Te'ō and Tuatagaloa, Tu'i Malaeimi, Manusāmoa, Tu'i 'Ofu, and even Sālamasina Tafa'ifā who received her titles from the war godess, her aunt Nafanua. All of these historical figures are among the most storied names in Sāmoan oral culture. Augmented by the prodigious research of my late aunt, who was a dutiful Mormon genealogist and passionate history teacher no less, and knowledge passed down orally to me by my father I've managed to trace both my paternal and maternal family trees back to an important ancestor for many Ali'i lineages in Sāmoa and Hawai'i. Though less well known than Māui, also an ancestor, and a contemporary of his, this ancestor's pedigree informs the highest titles in both Sāmoa and Hawai'i.
His name was Pili.
Pili was chief and his high priest was Pa'ao.
Pili was an ancestor to the four great Tu'i lines of 'Upolu, Sāmoa: Ana (Tu'i 'a 'Ana), Tua (Tu'i 'a Tua), Tuamasaga, and Tolufale.
Pili was an ancestor of Kāmehameha I.
In Hawai'i he was called by many epithets:
Pili-'ao'ao "Pili of the Family of Gods", "Pili of the Peculiar Ways", "Pili of the Other Side"
Pili-a'oa'o "Pili of Plots", "Pili of Stratagems"
Pili-ka'a-i-ea "Pili of the Ability to Govern", "Pili of the Authority to Rule"
Polynesian migrations exploded out of Central Polynesia and eventually discovered and inhabited every single habitable scrap of island in the Pacific Ocean -- the Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa -- from Hawai'i to Tahiti and Rarotonga (Cook Islands) to Aotearoa (its colonial epithet being "New" Zealand after "Old" Zealand which is an island of Denmark). With this understanding it seemed logical to me that there would have been evidence of Polynesian language in the names of people, places and things throughout the American Pacific coast.
This is when I learned that the information shared with me by my grandmother (that her mother was part Pipil) was potentially linguistic evidence of contact between Polynesians and the Americas.
"PIPIL" in the indigenous, non-Spanish Nahuatl language means “nobility”, "a person or child of noble lineage".
Royalty, huh?
This really piqued my interest. Was my great great grandmother descended from Indigenous Mesoamerican royalty?
Well, I haven't yet found an answer to that question, but I found something else just as wild.
COLOCHO
Great great grandmother's surname is “Colocho”, which means “curly-haired” in Central American Spanish. "Colocho" is not a word in the European Spanish language, but enters Latin American Spanish as a phonological loanword from Nahuatl "COLOTL", "KOLOTL" which means “scorpion”.
As a Polynesian researcher this immediately signaled to me a promising linguistic lead. The constellation "Scorpius" was one of the most prominent guiding lights used by Oceanic navigators. It is featured in the ubiquitous Polynesian legends of Māui and his brothers as variously a magic fish hook, a magic jawbone, and other mystical forms, the proper use of which enabled the "fishing up" of Tonga, all of Hawai'i, and Aotearoa's North and South Islands, also called Te-Ika-a-Maui "The Fish of Maui" and Te-Wai-Pounamu "The Greenstone Waters" or Te-Waka-o-Aoraki "The Ship of Aoraki". If Scorpius could fish up every single major island chain, only a complete idiot of a navigator could fail to miss an "island" that scoops up the entire eastern end of the Pacific Ocean past Rapa Nui (Easter Island) from the North Pole to South Pole.
Certainly there must be a connection. PILI screams “I’m a cognate!”
As it turns out the word "PIPIL" has a number of orthographic variants and reflexes including:
PILI was a foundational ancestor of Sāmoan and Hawaiian *elite* (Ali’i) genealogies.
PILI was important on a number of accounts as the reason for his high status was due to his being a child of the highest gods of Polynesia--a noble child of pure blood not yet watered down by the blood of commoners, in Hawai'i referred to as maka'ainana. In Sāmoa, Pili was the son of Tagaloa-a-Lagi, the Tagaloa of the Highest Heaven, metaphorically, the head of the "octopus" god Kanaloa.
I have maintained this awareness for some years now and in digging deeper into potential cognates for COLOCHO in Pacific languages, I have found a number of strong candidates for cognates that emerge when affording for linguistic drift patterns on the consonants and local orthographies to each island group. The following rules of thumb were used in identifying cognates:
/k/ and /t/ switch, which is well-known and attested in Pacific linguistics
the glottalization of the stop-consonant /k/ and occasionally /h/
shifting of the back consonant /h/ to alveolar /s/ and labiodental /f/
/l/, /r/, /alveolar tap/ rhotic switch, also well-known and attested in Pacific linguistics
Tahitian: HORO
Complex of definitions:
“Songs to lift the spirit”, “songs to reveal information”, “songs to share traditions”, “to lift up”, “to curve”, “stick used to stir round”, “a point”, “a promontory”, “a noose”, “5th day of the moon’s age”, "to uncover", "to reveal", "to lift a cover", "to hasten on", "to speed along", "to slide along", "to get going", "to kindle a fire by rubbing sticks together", "to pass along"
Most dimensions of this /olo/-complex of sounds are descriptive of the curve and hook shape of the scorpion’s stinger-tipped tail as well as movement with alacrity along the chain of its tail. Additionally, there is a theme of the transfer of fire using sticks, the traditional method of fire-starting in Polynesian culture.
And then there's “Curly”, which is the lifting of the ends--peeling back the edges, uncovering what is hidden beneath.
And since I believe I have found a cognate between Nahuatl and Oceanic, I have been in the habit of checking these types of connections against the Hopi language, which is a fellow Uto-Aztecan descendant alongside Nahuatl.
On 2023/02/04 14:13 PST I identified cognates of Nahuatl "COLOTL" / "KOLOTL" in the Hopi language / Hopìikwa Third Mesa dialect.
HÖL- / HÖLÖ- “Rising up, lifting up, peeling up, curling up”; implied: “spreading out”, “unfolding”, “removing covers”, “uncovering”, “springing up”, “sprouting”, “revealing”; and therefore figuratively “revelation”, “deciphering of secrets”; often linked with the ultra-thin, delicate, blue-corn, native unleavened bread called PIKI, which curls around its edges when ready to be served and is peeled away from the cookstone, uncovering the hot, flat surface.
There’s a metaphor for migration in this humble mannah-like food.
See video: https://youtu.be/ZUuWoiOIRCY
I believe PIKI to be a cognate of Polynesian PI’I, PĪ, which means “to climb”, “to rise”, “to cling together”, “to go upland”, “to go inland”. The theme about rising is reinforced by each word and must hold some originally sacred aspect.
Hopi:
KHO / KO- / KOHO / KOO : firewood, stick, wood
My understanding of today's exercise is that the celestial sign of Scorpius is one of birth, death, rebirth, which hearkens back to Mesopotamian astronomical and astrological traditions related to the Scorpion.
The Scorpion's tail an its fiery venom is both a weapon, a figurative gateway to the land of the dead, as well as a medicine, healing through reduction, and in its hot venom there lies a metaphorical torchbearer.
All these clues from a Nahuatl family name -- Colocho.
Looking farther west in the Pacific for words pertaining to scorpions, we find in Indonesia and Malay KALA, which means both "scorpion" and also refers to the constellation Scorpius. In Balinese, an extension of KALA may be TALEDU / TLEDU which is built around the root TALED, which means "a cover, a table mat, a lid", which echoes the meaning of all the previously mentioned words (HÖL-, HÖLÖ- / HOLO / TOLO / TORO, etc.) In Island Southeast Asia (ISEA) there may be a further link to Sanskrit KALA (काल) which means also "time", "age", "era", "fate", "destiny" and refers to the god Śiwa / Śiva / Shiva (शिव), as the Destroyer, the prototype for Father Time, the Reaper, Κρόνος (Krónos) to the Greeks, and Saturn to the Romans. We also find TAALA / TAALAW- in the Hopi language as meaning "light" with connotations of sunbeams, the horns, rays, crown, corona, and thorns of the sun.
This actually makes some sense as an alternative epithet that refers to the stinger of the Scorpion's tail, which in an oceanic idiom lacking in scorpions, would end up affixed in the language to a range of marine animals with spikes and barbs. Figuratively, as a sharp point, the word KALA / TALA / TARA in Polynesian languages came to mean "the point of a story", "to narrate", "a tale".
References:
Online Nahuatl Dictionary, Stephanie Wood, ed. (Eugene, Ore.: Wired Humanities Projects, College of Education, University of Oregon, ©2000–present)
Hopi dictionary = Hopìikwa lavàytutuveni : a Hopi-English dictionary of the Third Mesa dialect with an English-Hopi finder list and a sketch of Hopi grammar. Tucson : University of Arizona Press, 1998.
A Grammar and Dictionary of the Samoan Language. By George Pratt, Samuel James Whitmee · 1878
The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary. By Edward Tregear · 1891
Hawaiian Dictionaries. Ulukau, the Hawaiian Electronic Library.
A Tahitian and English dictionary,. Davies, H. J. (Herbert John); London Missionary Society. Publication date 1851
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