Tea vs Chai, the Tekka Centre and my last name (I)

This post is about three things: (1) the name of a very popular beverage that the vast majority of readers would be familiar with; (2) the name of a building complex near Little India that most Singaporeans would be familiar with; and (3) my family name, which only my friends would be familiar with (but which is actually a pretty common Chinese name around the world).

And yes, there's a linguistic point to all of this.

Let's start with what's least familiar: my last name, which happens to be Teo (I pronounce it as [t^hjo]). It is a Hokkine / Minnan name that has its origins in southern China. While it may not look familiar to most people outside SE Asia, it's actually etymologically related to one of the most common Chinese surnames around the world. The Chinese character used to write it is 张 (simplified) or 張 (traditional). The standard Mandarin equivalent is transliterated as Zhang in pinyin and pronounced as /tʂaŋ/ (tone not given) - it's like saying 'chunk', but (a) you don't have a final 'k' sound and (b) when you pronounce 'ch' sound, your tongue curls back a bit (this is what is called a 'retroflex' sound) and you shouldn't have a strong puff of air. The Cantonese equivalents I believe are transliterated as Cheung, Cheong or Chong, depending on the transliteration system.

Most of you will probably have started to recognise these names and probably even know people with one of these names. But you've also probably noticed that while the Mandarin and Cantonese forms look quite similar, the Minnan name Teo doesn't look (or sound) anything like the others. So how is it related?

Before I get to that point, let's look at the name of a famous building complex located in Little India, Singapore: the Tekka Centre. (I was just there a week ago with a friend from Australia.)

The Wikipedia article gives the original (Hokkien) name of the market as Tek Kia Kha, meaning 'foot of the small bamboos' which was eventually shortened to Tekka. For those who can read Chinese, you'll notice on the right the Chinese characters 竹 'bamboo' and 脚 'leg / foot'. The standard Mandarin reading of 竹 is zhu in pinyin and pronounced /tʂu/, while in Hokkien 竹 is transliterated as tek and pronounced something like /tɛk/.

Now I remember going on a school trip to Little India in the 1990s and being utterly confused because the centre had been renamed the 'Zhujiao Centre' to match the Mandarin reading of 竹脚. In reality, almost everyone still referred to it as the 'Tekka Market'. The building has since been renamed the 'Tekka Centre' to avoid confusion (which Wikipedia tells me happened in 2000).

The point was, I could see no resemblance between Mandarin zhu and Hokkien tek. Since then, I've also learnt a lot more about historical sound changes, and noticed other examples of Mandarin 'zh' (a retroflex sound) corresponding to Hokkien 't', like with my last name. Simply put, they are both said to have descended from a sequence of 't' and 'r' early in the history of Chinese. In the Minnan languages / dialects, including Hokkien, the 'r' sound was lost, while in other varieties, including standard Mandarin, the combination of 'tr' became a retroflex sound, as represented in pinyin by the letters zh. Pulleyblank (1991) reconstructs the pronunciation of 竹 as truwk in Early Middle Chinese and triwk in Late Middle Chinese. Guillaume Jacques here also gives 'tr' as an initial in Early Middle Chinese, with the pronunciation of 张 reconstructed as 'trjang'. We still see the 'tr' combination in the Vietnamese surname Trương / Truong. (Vietnamese is not Sinitic, but it was heavily influenced by it for centuries.)

Of course, this only explains how the first sounds in Teo and tek in Hokkien correspond to Zhang and zhu in Mandarin. To explain the rest would require more than a humble blog post.

So what does this have to do with all the tea in China (and all the chai in India)? Check out tomorrow's post.

Feature phones

Most people would now be familiar with the term smartphone, and have at least some idea as to what a smartphone is. Yesterday, my friend R. taught me a new term (for an old thing): feature phone.

Unlike most people I know, I don't own an iPhone or an Android phone (something that surprises my friends I appear to always be on Facebook and Twitter). When I'm in Melbourne, I still use a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic from back in 2009. I don't think it's the best example of a smartphone - but it has pretty advanced computing ability and allows me to connect to internet (via a wifi connection) and use Bluetooth.

However, on my last trip to Nepal and India, I was hesitant to take the phone with me for a number of reasons. One, the battery life is poor - I'd have to recharge it at least once every two days and given that electricity isn't always guaranteed, I'd find myself without a usable phone for longer than I'd like. Two, it's not particularly durable and I'd worry about dropping it and breaking it in a remote area with no hope of getting it fixed. Three, it was locked to a particular network in Australia, and while I could have got it unlocked, it didn't seem the effort given the first two reasons.

So, instead I brought my old Nokia 3100 (really really classic old school Nokia), which my friend told me was a feature phone: basically, any mobile phone that isn't a smartphone. People in the industry might have more sophisticated ways of distinguishing the two, although the Wikipedia article suggests that there isn't an official definition for either smartphone or feature phone. In any case, I don't think there'd be any case to suggest my Nokia 3100 was a smartphone.

I got this phone back in 2004 and since then, it's followed me around the world twice. I took it with me when I went on exchange to Russia and France and then when I was teaching English in Xinjiang. It was great last year in Nepal and India because it was everything my other phone wasn't: The battery lasts a few days before I have to charge it. I've dropped it a few times, but it still kept going. And I can put it just about any SIM card I like. Basically, everything I want in a phone when I'm out in a remote area doing fieldwork. I don't know how long more it'll last, but I intend to use till it finally goes the way of all phones.

Ironically, the last time I was in Nagaland, I noticed quite a few people actually did have the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. A friend of mine even used his to play music - something I had never considered doing on the phone, despite the name of the model - while we driving from Zunheboto to Kohima. Sadly, before we even got halfway there, the battery had died.

Happy Deepavali / Diwali

To all Hindus, Happy Deepavali / இனிய தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள் (iniya deepavali nalvazhthukkal). It's a public holiday here in Singapore. Unlike last year when I was really getting into the spirit of the Nepali counterpart Tihar (see here), this year there won't be any such cultural immersion for me. However, I did drop by Little India here in Singapore yesterday looking for sweets, which was a big mistake, given the last minute rush for sweets and other items for pooja / puja.

The majority of Singaporean Indians are Tamil, and the Tamil language is one of the official languages of Singapore, though sadly, it's usually the forgotten child out of the four - the only Tamil I ever paid attention to while growing up in Singapore was vannakkam, which I'd often hear at the end of the Tamil news. Also, there was never any motivation for me to learn Tamil, given that we spoke English at home, I had to learn Mandarin in school and Malay would've been my next choice since my parents speak Malay.

In any case, it's not surprising that you find signs like this one in Tamil (which reads iniya deepavali nalvazhthukkal):

But nowadays, it's also not uncommon to see signs in Hindi as well, like this one which reads: शुभ दिवाली (shubh diwālī).

A note about the etymology of the Hindi diwālī (the use of the macron indicates a long vowel): many websites I've seen say that the Hindi is a 'contraction' of the Sanskrit दीपावली dīpāvalī, a compound of दीपा dīpā 'lamp' and avalī अवली 'row'. I'm certain linguists have already worked out the exact sound changes - I just haven't spent the time doing the research, but I thought I'd have a go at explaining why it's called diwālī in Hindi, but deepavali in Tamil.

First of all, Tamil தீபாவளி deepavali  (or more precisely, tīpāvaļi since Tamil does not make a meaningful contrast between the sounds d and t) has clearly preserved the number of syllables of the original word. I'm assuming here that Tamil, probably Middle Tamil, borrowed the term from Sanskrit.

In contrast, if we assume that Hindi  दिवाली diwālī is ultimately from Sanskrit दीपावली dīpāvalī, the easiest way to explain the change would be to say that the Hindi form has undergone 'lenition', a common sound change whereby consonants 'weakened' in some way, particularly when they are surrounded by two vowels. We see such lenition in most varieties of English, e.g. the t in words like water and city are rarely pronounced like the t in words like term and tea: instead of a strongly aspirated stop [t^h], speakers often just produce a very quick tap of the tongue.

One common sound change pathway is: [p] > [b] > [v] > [ʋ] (a sound similar to [w]) > nothing. If you practise making these sounds, you'll notice that all of them involve using the lips, or at least part of the lips. Speakers of Singlish (or if you listen to the video in my previous post) will notice that the word never is often pronounced neh, with no [v] sound in the middle of the word. This is an example of such lenition.

It is therefore not difficult to see how the original [v] sound in a word like dīpāvalī could be completed deleted, while the [p] sound could lenite to [b] and then to [ʋ] (written as 'w' in transliterations of Hindi).

Simi, the Singaporean version of Siri

More Siri stuff. But since I'm in Singapore, I thought I'd blog about a clip from the mrbrown show that's been making the rounds among Singaporeans (and fans of Singlish). By the way, simi is Hokkien for 'what?' The uploader of this particular video on Youtube was also kind enough to provide a transcript of the dialogue:

I found the clip hilarious and thought I should make some comments on the language used, for the sake of my non-Singaporean linguist friends. I'm certainly no expert on Singlish (having done any personal research on the subject), but I will say that Simi's speech corresponds to a 'basilect' form of Singaporean English, which is what most people would call 'Singlish', as spoken by an ah beng 'an unsophicated Chinese boy, usually Hokkien' (as defined by TalkingCock.com).

You can find the ubiquitous sentence-final particles, including the (in)famous lah, but also other particles like ar, leh, one, what and the question particle meh. The Wikipedia article on Singlish provides a neat summary of the various particles found in Singlish, though I think they need to provide a bit more contextual evidence especially since the use of most particles is governed by context and pragmatics.

I myself should pay more attention to the use of particles in Singlish (and more standard varieties of English for that matter), as they often help me analyse particles used in languages I study. In addition to the particular context that the particle occurs in, there's usually an emotional connection with its use that's difficult to define. Speakers will often say things like a sentence / utterance 'sounds better' with a particular particle, or that the presence of a particle makes the speaker sound either more or less 'angry' or 'surprised' or 'timid' etc.

Some other grammatical features characteristic of Singlish: copular verbs (e.g. 'to be' and its forms 'is', 'are', 'am') are typically dropped before adjectives, e.g. Migrate better lah!; The CTE jam from Ang Mo Kio to Orchard Road (my intuitions tell me that jam here isn't being used as a verb). Plurality isn't usually marked on nouns with a suffix but with a quantifier like so many, e.g. got so many Bangla and PRC come and take your job and make your MRT so crowded.

You also find a few 'typically Singlish' words / expressions used, like tahan 'to endure' (from Malay) and atas 'snobbish' (lit. 'upstairs') (from Malay), as well as sibei jialat (from Hokkien) - sibei 'very' and jialat 'f*cked' (okay not quite, it literally means 'to eat strength' in Hokkien - maybe kinda like Mandarin 吃苦 'to bear hardship', lit. 'to eat bitterness').

One expression I wasn't familiar with was: why you fly my aeroplane? I had to look up the TalkingCock.com entry to learn that it means 'why are you standing me up?'. To fly aeroplane also corresponds to the Hokkien pang puay kee? but the origin of this phrase is indeterminate.

(The transcriber wasn't able to / didn't want to make out the name of the restaurant at 3:13 in the video. It's actually called the 'Ku De Ta Restaurant', located at on the roof of the new Marina Bay Sands hotel - or 'Coup d'état Restaurant', another not-so-subtle hint of subversion by the awesome mrbrown show.) 

Translation pls - Part (II)

In a similar vein to my post "Translation pls", I've discovered through a friend this blog post about Facebook and Tibetan at the Overlooking Tibet blog.

The writer considers the 'Facebook wall' to be personal space, which some people might take issue with, since it is still a public space where one broadcasts information to people on their friends list. However, the blog post alludes to wider expectations that American (and I'd say most English speakers for that matter) have that things be made available in English.

In any case, I could spend hours talking about this, but I'm off to attend a seminar at La Trobe Uni on Tibetic languages by the eminent Tibetologist Nicolas Tournadre, whose Manual of Standard Tibetan I own a copy of.

Très coincidental. Well maybe just a little bit.

What you risk when you step out your door

'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step onto the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.'"

Yesterday I learnt that my friend Sara, who's been doing fieldwork up in the Himalayas (see this post from when I visited her last year), had an accident. From what I've heard, it's not too major, but it does require her to fly back to Kathmandu to get the problem fixed. Also, most people are actually terrified of flying in and out of Lukla airport (Youtube is filled with videos like this one) and there also seems to be at least one accident every year involving these small aircraft. I hope she's alright and that her trip to the hospital in Kathmandu won't actually make things worse...

Her accident reminded me of the inherent risk involved when you spend a long time in a place that's miles away from any proper hospital / healthcare facility. It also reminded me of the 'risk management' forms I'd recently filled in in order to get authorisation to embark on this upcoming trip. (Note: I don't officially have approval yet, but I've already got my tickets and I'll be in Singapore for just under 2 weeks.)

This was the first time I'd actually had to fill in such forms and it brought home the fact that the whole of North-east India is classified as 'Category 4 - Reconsider your need to travel' by DFAT and hence, a 'high risk' area. One of the forms had three sections to fill in:

• 'Potential risk' - what could go wrong during the travel
• 'Contributing factors / detailed risk contributions' - what could contribute to something going wrong
• 'Detailed controls' - what do you have in place to manage / reduce the identified risk

There were 4 broad categories of risk:
- Health
- Personal safety
- Civil unrest
- Terrorism

All 4 are applicable to the North-east.

Now, I usually don't consider health a major issue, since I carry my own medication and prefer to self-medicate or just rest when it's something like the flu. Mosquito-borne diseases also aren't a problem in the hills and especially during the dry season. However, I have had food poisoning twice in Nagaland, and the last time I had to endure being on a bus for 10 hours while suppressing the need to throw up, but I had people looking after me the next day. I also feel like I'd be able to get to a hospital within a day from wherever I am, though I am concerned about the state of most hospitals in India.

In terms of personal safety, I'm usually with other people when I'm in the North-east. I avoid travelling at night between cities (except for that trip on the bus with a whole group of farmers) and in towns I don't usually venture out at night all by myself. I also try to avoid riding in helicopters which have notoriously bad safety records in the region.

Civil unrest hasn't been such a problem during my last two trips to Nagaland. In fact, I've had more trouble in Assam, specifically the district of Karbi Anglong, which is frequently struck by bandhs, where local groups call for businesses to close and all local transport generally comes to a halt, unless you're on 'hospital' duty. I've only wandered out on bandh days if my friends who are familiar with the situation say it's alright to go out.

And of course, there's terrorism: North-east India is home to a myriad of organisations who are agitating for some sort of independence, be it from the state of Assam or the country of India itself. In particular, Republic Day on 26 January (same as Australia Day) is not a good time to be travelling. Earlier this year, most of the trains in the region were cancelled during the week surrounding Republic Day. A bus travelling from Guwahati to Manipur was also stopped somewhere in Karbi Anglong in the middle of the night and some passengers were shot. I was in the main city of Guwahati at the time, and I pretty much avoided hanging around the train station and marketplaces, which have been targets of bomb blasts in the past.

At the end of the day, it's not as if I'm completely alone when I travel in the North-east. I have plenty of local friends / guides and take plenty of local advice. There's always risk, but it can be minimised and managed, and I usually have an exit strategy. I generally try not to dwell on the dangers, but it's good to acknowledge them when you fill in such forms and to explicitly state how you would deal with the dangers should push come to shove. The RCLT (Research Centre for Linguistic Typology) at La Trobe Uni has a great fieldwork manual that also includes risk management (available online at the RNLD website here).

On the other hand sometimes I can't help but think: what happens if I come down with some unknown disease and need to go to a hospital but there's a strike happening and I'm forced to travel by helicopter and the helicopter crashes in the middle of the jungle and I somehow survive but run into rebel groups who then take me prisoner...

Japanese issues with Siri / Shiri

I don't actually own a smartphone, but this video's been making the rounds since the introduction of Siri with the new iP***e. I thought I'd just make a small phonetics-related comment.

Listening to the speaker, the main problem here is his production of the NURSE vowel (typically /ɜ/ or /ɜr/),  which is a notoriously problematic one for many a non-native English speaker. The Japanese speaker produces the vowel closer to the THOUGHT vowel (typically /ɔ/). I'm just surprised that with a binary option: 'work' or 'home', Siri doesn't just go with what sounds closer to the 'work' option (but I'm not one who knows anything about programming, so I'll let the techsperts deal with that.)

I'm a little late to talk about this, but for the past 2 weeks, people have been talking about how siri means 'buttocks' in Japanese. Some people like this guy at TechnoBuffalo argue that it doesn't (it means nothing he claims). The thing is, technically, the 's' /s/ sound in Japanese never comes before the 'i' /i/ vowel: think of Japanese words that have been borrowed into English, like sushi, where 's' can precede the 'u' /ɯ/ vowel, but 'sh' /ʃ/ comes before 'i''.

However, in some transliterations of Japanese, you will see the word for 'I' written as both watashi and watasi. The reason is, as stated above, that the 's' sound can't come before 'i' and must be replaced by 'sh'. Therefore by default, the si in watasi will be read as shi. So siri by default, will be pronounced like shiri, which the internet would have me believe is Japanese for 'buttocks'.

Translation fail (Melbourne Airport)

A few months ago, I spotted this at the departure lounge at Melbourne International Airport:

Somewhere in the translation from English to Chinese, gates 17, 19 and 20 just disappeared.

The system called 'reciprocity'

In honour of the new book that's being launched in the department this afternoon: Reciprocals and Semantic Typology (edited by Nick Evans, Alice Gaby, Steve Levinson and Asifa Majid), I thought I'd mention what 'reciprocals' are in linguistics and give some examples from a few common languages. (Given that I haven't seen the book yet, the examples given may be somewhat contradictory to what is given in the book.)

Those of you familiar with the concept of 'reciprocity' (or the Chicago number which the title of this post comes from) will know that it involves an 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine' or 'you be good to Mama, Mama's good to you' attitude. Similarly, 'reciprocals' in linguistics typically refer to grammatical structures that encode events where a participant is doing something to another while another participant or participants are doing the same thing to the first participant at / around the same time.

Languages do this in a number of ways. One way is to use a free standing pronoun. English uses this strategy somewhat, with each other and one another the most common ways of marking reciprocity. English grammars often treat these as 'reciprocal pronouns', but at least one editor of the book treats them differently, though they are still considered to be noun phrases. In any case, some examples in English include:

They hit each other. (By the way, linguists love using the verb 'hit' when they need a transitive verb.)
We help one another.

(Also:
We scratch each other's backs.
Mama and you are good to each other.)

Russian uses друг друга 'drug druga' (in the accusative case) or друг другу 'drug drugu' (in the dative case).

Они били друг друга.
'They hit each other.'

Мы помогаем друг другу.
'We help one another.' (lit. 'We help to one another.')

A second tactic would be to use a 'bound pronoun' or clitic. People familiar with Romance (and Slavic) languages will know the recognise the pronoun se which really can't stand by itself as a full word that can be stressed and needs to attach itself to the verb.

For instance, in French we have:

On se voit bientôt.
'We'll see each other soon.'

Ils s'aiment.
'They love each other.'

French also has the phrases l'un l'autre (for 2 participants) and les uns les autres (for more than 2 participants) which are comparable to English one another, but they're still used in conjunction with se to add emphasis to the pronoun (or so I'm led to believe by French grammar books).

Il s'aiment l'un l'autre.

'They love each other.'

A third strategy would be to use an adverb, like mutually in English. Although in English, you often still need to have the pronoun, as in:

They mutually dislike each other.

Mandarin typically uses the adverb 互相 hù xiāng to make a reciprocal construction (I usually associate its use with 'positive' actions, but I know it can be used with less mutually beneficial actions.)

我们互相帮助。

'We help each other.'

There are numerous other ways in which languages mark reciprocity, and I'm fairly certain most are covered in the book. From what I've read of the blurb, the book also considers whether the concept of reciprocity is the same across all languages, or if they are best viewed as a cluster of related ideas.

Some of you may be wondering why on earth anyone would be interested in reciprocals. I'm not sure if I have any real insight into the matter myself, since reciprocals don't really fascinate me the way other aspects of grammar do. Nevertheless, these constructions occur across languages (though they make take different guises), and any learner of a foreign language will have to, at some point, learn how to use such constructions in the target language.

In any case, shouldn't the sentence 'We should help one another' be something we ought to utter more often, in any language? (Sadly, the only sentence with a reciprocal that I have in Sumi is: Nikujo ithi kile acheni. 'We used to know each other.)

Translation pls

This post is actually about code switching on one's Facebook wall and negotiating this particularly virtual space.
[EDIT: I've made a few changes to the original because it sounded a lot more aggressive than I intended it to be.]

Earlier this week, I'd posted this on an Australian friend's Facebook wall:

Quoi de neuf? What's this about living semi-permanently in XXXX?

This was in response to something I'd read about him moving back to XXXX. I used the French for 'What's new?' at the start because he's living in France and I knew that he had been learning French. I didn't want to write the whole post in French because I wasn't sure of his current level.

However, his reply was about 4 lines long, completely in French. It was actually a piece of bad news, but I assume he felt comfortable enough to put it on his wall, even if most of his friends don't speak French. His switching from English to French made me feel like he was privileging me with the response / information. Of course I didn't know how much his other friends already knew and thought that maybe he'd already mentioned something before and didn't want to repeat himself in English.

So following his lead, I continued the conversation in French with a comment expressing my condolences.

Within the hour, another friend had commented:

Translation pls?

A few hours later, there was another:

English, please. ;-)

Now, if comments like these appeared on my own wall I would be really annoyed for two main reasons. One, I perceive the wall on my Facebook profile as belonging to me - I mean, it's 'my' wall. I own it. (And Mark Zuckerberg owns me, but that's a different story.)  Sure, it's designed for public viewing, but I still perceive it as a space in which someone should be allowed to express thoughts / vent frustrations / share news in whatever language they choose and without having to explain themselves. It's fine for people to post on other people's walls, but they still have to be mindful that they are in someone else's 'personal space'.

For instance, I once posted a link to an article about the 2009 Xinjiang riots involving Hans and Uyghurs. A 'friend' on my Facebook (who I don't know very well and who also happens to be one of the annoying commenters above) replied to my post with a comment that I thought was somewhat racist and potentially insulting to my Uyghur friends, so I deleted it. Offended, this 'friend' accused me of denying him his freedom of speech. I said, sure he could say anything he liked, but just not on my wall. I then proceeded to block him.

Two, if someone posts in a particular language, I assume it's because they have a particular target audience in mind (also assuming they're not being a show-off douche). When one of my friends who lived in Japan for a bit posts in Japanese, I know it's intended for his fellow Japanese-speaking friends - the shared linguistic code serves as an in-group marker demarcating a group of friends within his larger network of friends. Some people might consider it rude to everyone else on the friends list, but I liken it to when people post quotes from a TV show, knowing that the only people who will get the joke are fellow viewers of that show. It therefore strikes me as somewhat rude when other people demand a translation for posts in a language other than English, like it's their right to understand everything that's on the wall. Admittedly there are times when people, including myself, make posts that sound a little cryptic in order to fish for questions or comments, but the idea is, if someone posts is in a language that I don't speak, I just ignore it, because it probably wasn't meant for me anyway!

I don't know how my friend felt about those requests / demands for English translations, but I can't imagine he would have wanted to repeat what he'd just said. His lack of a response to their comments seems to confirm my own suspicions that he didn't want to repeat himself.

In any case, here's a simple solution to people who still think it's rude that people post in languages they don't understand:

Just learn the language.

Or just learn to use Google Translate.

How many languages...

On the weekend I was having brunch with a polyglot friend who asked me, "How do you answer the question, 'How many languages do you speak?'"

Before I continue, I should point out that just about everyone I know who has had to say, "I'm a linguist" or "I study linguistics" has also faced the inevitable question, "So how many languages do you speak?" It's such a common phenomenon that most language / linguistics-related blogs would have a post covering the topic and there's even a Facebook group named 'You're a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?'
(The other usual comment is "I'd better watch what I say around you" and I've even had a good friend who was shocked when he realised I wasn't a grammar Nazi or a punctuation Nazi (like srsly, wtf?))

Anyway (and before this post spirals into a rant about how linguists should not be expected to be polyglots), the question asked by my friend raises two issues that gives me constant grief: since I am a polyglot, how do I quantify the number of languages that I speak? And more importantly, how on earth do I give an answer that will satisfy both me and my interrogator?

Measuring language competency, or rather 'competencies', is a pretty big issue in language testing and personally, I always have a (self-assessed) 'Language Competencies" section near the start of any CV I submit. Following the format of a professor's CV, I list English as my native language, then specify my 'reading/written competence' and 'spoken/listening' competence for each subsequent language. It looks like this:

• English (native language)

• French (full reading/written competence and excellent spoken/listening)

• Mandarin (...)

• Russian (...)

• (random 5th language) (typically 'basic reading and speaking')

I always put a maximum of 5 languages (depending on the job, I might just list 3 so I don't look too much like a wanker). The adjectives I use with regard to competence are 'full', 'excellent', 'good' and 'basic', whatever 'full' means since I'd still need a bilingual dictionary if I was reading a French book. And yes, I might sometimes overstate my competencies. After all, it is a CV, and I do want to highlight the fact that I possess more language skills than your average monolingual English speaker. And breaking down the competencies into two categories seems to be a more 'honest' reflection of my language skills, even if what I'm referring to are different aspects of grammatical competence (using Canale and Swain's 1980 terminology).

It still doesn't make answering the question "How many languages do you speak?" any easier though. If I listed out all my competencies in a normal conversation, I'd sound like an academic suffering from Aspergers (or, maybe just an academic). It's worse as a linguist interested in phonetics and morphosyntax, because I know a lot of stuff about languages that I don't speak. For instance, I wouldn't even consider myself a speaker of Sumi, even though it's the language I worked on for my Masters. It also doesn't help that I know short phrases from Greek to Japanese to Sherpa...

So lately, I've begun responding to the question by saying, "The better question would be to ask: how many languages can you survive in?" I suppose when I talk about survival, I mean being able to handle a wide range of communicative contexts in a particular language. I then list 3 or 4 languages.

Of course, this brings up the issue of how many such 'contexts' are needed for me to qualify as being competent. For instance, in Guwahati I'm happy to jump into an auto and give my driver basic directions in Assamese, but I would not be as comfortable trying to buy a SIM card only relying on Assamese. (I wouldn't be able to hold an entire conversation in Assamese either.) Also, 'survival' implies strategic competence (using Canale and Swain's terminology again): I could still survive in a foreign language situation with minimal language skills by relying on non-verbal means to get my message across.

So I guess It's not ideal, but most people really don't care for that much detail anyway.

I mean if I felt like it, I could always go with my other measure of language ability:
How many languages do I speak well enough to swear at people in?

Back in business

It's been 6 months since my blog post. A lot has happened since then, not all of it India-related. But I'm back and eagerly awaiting my return to Assam and Nagaland.

First, a shout-out to my friend Abokali for the amazing work she's been doing the past year keeping up the documentation of traditional Sumi songs and knowledge. She's got her own awesome blog here at:
http://thevillagemicroscope.blogspot.com/

Her brother Canato also has a blog - check out his fantastic artwork at:
http://canajimo.blogspot.com/

So the big news is that we've received two grants this year. One from the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, and another from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), the granting component of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. These grants are for project that aims to document traditional songs and stories of the Sumis of Nagaland. I was around last year to help with a few pilot recordings last December (see photo below) and with some local fundraising (not fun) in the town of Zunheboto. With the funds, we will be able to purchase new equipment, purchase gifts / offer payment to performers, hire staff to do transcription and translation work, and produce a book and DVD for the community.

In the meantime, I'm trying to sort out my travel arrangements...

More posts will come, now that I'm back.

(Also, check out L.'s new linguistics blog at:
http://www.superlinguo.com/)