The Tongan Word for "No"

You may have heard this educational song by Flanders and Swan:

Oh its hard to say, olimakityluchachichichi, but in Tonga that means "no",
If I ever have the money, 'tis to Tonga I shall go...
For each lovely Tongan maiden there, will gladly make a date,
and by the time she's said olimakityluchachichichi,
It is usually too late!


You may also have spent hours, perhaps days, repeating "olimakityluchachichichi" to yourself, as a first step to learn Tongan.

You then wasted some time, I'm afraid. Flanders and Swan were not particularly accurate on this point, and the real Tongan word for "no" is "‘ikai".

(I have not found any overly reputable source for this, but search the web for Tongan no 'ikai, and you will find some bilingual official forms and private blogs that confirm it.)

Xinjiang and Turkey - who gets at whom?

10 July 2009, there was an article about the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, describing the events in Xīnjiāng (新疆, شىنجاڭ) as a kind of genocide.

11 July, there was another article, stating that three quarters of the victims were Han (汉) Chinese and not Uighur.

Does that mean that mr. Erdoğan denounced an Uighur genocide of innocent Han Chinese?

Considering that the Uighur are a Turkish people, that is unlikely. It is more likely that he either did not know the official numbers or did not trust them.

Global Times also gives a gender breakdown: 26 Han Chinese women were killed. Only one Uighur woman was killed.

We do not need to trust Chinese official figures - as little as we need to trust figures from any other source which has interests at stake. However, neither do we have to pretend that they do not exist.

Analysing this kind of events is usually very difficult, considering the complexity and how little facts are available. To ignore some claims but not others does not make it easier.