My favorite peculiarity in navigating the Samoan language comes from the words fia and mana’o. Fia and mana’o both mean to want or to need. Fia is used only with verbs (fia moe, want to sleep or fia ‘ai, need to eat), and mana’o is used only with nouns (mana’o le fasipua’a, want a piece of pork or mana’o le vai, need water). Although apparently, if you use fia with a noun it translates as wanting to be that thing, as in “Ou te fia le esi,” or “I want to be a papaya.”

Anyway, even though there are two different words, they both mean to want and to need. This is a challenge as a Peace Corps Volunteer because the distinction between wants and needs is kind of a big one. E.g. “You want a lawn mower, you do not need a lawnmower” or “I don’t need mayonnaise on my taro, but yes I do want some mayonnaise.”

Peace Corps Volunteers also like to joke that there are only about a dozen words in the Samoan language and it’s combinations of those dozen words along with a few prefixes and suffixes that make up the entirety of the language. E.g. mea = things, ‘ai = eat, therefore mea’ai = food; or fai = make/do/say, tau = price, therefore faitau = buy; and since tala = story, faitala means gossip. (Not at all a bad thing for the language learner, though.)

But the language does have this oddly literal sense. I was studying my color words recently, and most of them are in a similar vein: orange = lanumoli (color of orange fruit), blue = lanumoana (color of the ocean). But the most interesting was the word for green: lanumeamata. Literally, the word means something like “the color of how things look” (lanu = color, mea = things, mata = look). And, as I look around, it is indeed the color of how things look.