h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the Dances With Wolves movie, there's a Sioux word that they keep translating as "medicine," but the actual english meaning of "medicine" doesn't fit the context at all. I think this is because english doesn't have a proper word to represent the Sioux meaning, so can anyone explain to me what this actually means?

maybe they are using medicine in the shamanistic meaning of the word and not in the medical sense

example, killing eagle is bad medicine.

nothing medically wrong with killing an eagle.

similar to "bad juju"

Like saying "bad mojo"? I don't think that's it. It seems more like "power", or "knowledge", or "spiritual understanding" or something like that.

yes that is what i was trying to explain with a fatigue addled brain

medicine = spiritual
not
medicine = medical

Medicine in the spiritual sense is something like karma or magic. It can produce beneficial results (good medicine) or disasters and tragedies (bad medicine). Similar to luck but usually specific to the influence of things or actions either deliberate or incidental.

Similarly, medicine of the truly medical kind was (is) often seen as magic by those who do not understand biochemistry - which is most of us.


~jwf~
( got my mojo working,
but it jest don't work on you )

PS: Curiously the US/Canada border was called the Medicine Line because it gave Indians some protection from the US Cavalry's mission of genocide. See: Medicine Hat, a prairie town near that border.

From dictionary.com:
< The U.S.-Canadian boundary they called Medicine Line (first attested 1910), because it conferred a kind of magic protection...>

(errant pedantry alert)

'See: Medicine Hat, a prairie town near that border. '


Actually, ~jwf~, Medicine Hat got its name long before the border was ever drawn. It's a translation of the Niitsítapi word for the head-dress worn by a 'Medicine Man'.

Like I said, See: Medicine Hat.

~jwf~

Yes, that much was obvious from context-clues. But what does the word actually, literally translate as?

>> ...what does the word actually, literally translate as? <<

It doesn't. Medicine is an English word from Latin.

It was simply the closest word in English that the Indians could find to communicate a metaphysical idea to narrow-minded spiritless white men.

There could have been as many as 500 equivalent words for mojo or magic or medicine in the 500 distinct languages and dialects of the North American aboriginals. Not sure what the Sioux word might have been.

peace
~jwf~

I don't suspect you can get more precise.

I found this Lakota word list, Mr.X http://members.tripod.com/~Kayitah/page2.html

'pejula - medicine'
and
'pejula wacasa - medicine man'
but
'pejula sapa - coffee/black medicine'

there's also 'tatanka pejula' which gets translated as 'buffalo medicine'

translation is rarely a precise art. Does 'pejula' mean the same thing as 'medicine'? Does it mean 'magic'? Clearly, the connotations of both magic and medicine for a European (doctors and magicians) will be different than the connotations of pajula for the Lakota (the things a pejula wacasa does).

simulpost ~jwf~

pejula obligato

~jwf~

http://www.typetees.com/product/1683/Forget_science_I_m_donating_my_body_to_magic

this is the one for me: http://www.typetees.com/product/1671/I_supplement_my_personality_with_witty_shirts

>> ...what does the word actually, literally translate as? <<

There's a saying amongst linguists that 'If translation were possible, it wouldn't be necessary'.

Oftentimes, the best we can hope for is to get *something* of the meaning across. For example...the French word 'jaune' doesn't quite mean yellow (it also includes light tan, as in shoes); the Welsh word for 'blue' can also include both green and transparent; the Russian word for 'red' doesn't quite correspond to our red spectrum, and also implies 'beautiful'.

To ask what for an accurate translation Sioux word is bit like asking what's the English for 'entrepeneur'.

To add also to the comment about the 500 dialects comment.

Do we have an intact full language of the 'Sioux' indans (as if they were a 'homogeneous' race such as the Enlglish)? They were massacred so quickly that - as I've been led to understand in the past - we don't really know all that much about them.

there are a great many of what the Europeans still living and carrying on their culture and language in both the U.S. and Canada.

While the various groups suffered greatly through the U.S. Indian Wars, the near extermination of the bison, and the Canadian residential school system, they still proudly survive, as do the various branches of their language.

Entry on Sioux from my favourite Languages site:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sioux.htm

And while I'm at it...a link to a phrasebook with *really* useful phrases, such as 'Girls with big mazongas can't usually rhumba so well':
http://www.zompist.com/phrases.html

someone who might have been of help with this thread, if she were still posting: U213116

I wonder where Analiese is now.