History of Ebeye

When Christian missionaries first arrived in the Marshall Islands, they introduced Latin script writing and orthographized the Marshallese language. Originally, Ebeye was written Ebeje by Europeans and pronounced approximately which (according to elders of the atoll) means "making something out of nothing." However, the colonial German administration mispronounced the J as if it were German language [j], and foreign observers recorded the resulting pronunciation as Ebeye. During the Japanese period, though, the island's pronunciation in katakana, ebize re-approximated