Showing posts with label assamese. Show all posts
Showing posts with label assamese. Show all posts

Monday, November 26, 2012

Dog-tailed Tigers in Assamese

I saw this comic on xkcd last week (link):

(Or a cabbage, for that matter. The goat makes sense. Goats are fine.)

Too true.

Anyway, I showed this to an Assamese friend of mine, who told me that the Assamese version contained a tiger, not a wolf. But then again, he added, a 'wolf' in Assamese is literally a 'dog-tailed tiger' (with a little sound change involved).

So here we have the word for 'wolf' in Assamese: কুকুৰনেচীয়া বাঘ kukurnesiyaa bagh - it also could be transliterated as kukurnechiyaa, but the transliterated 'ch' is pronounced like [s] in Assamese.



We can clearly see the words কুকুৰ kukur 'dog' and বঘ bagh 'tiger'. We can also kinda see the word for 'tail', which in Assamese is নেজ nez - it could also be transliterated as nej, but in Assamese, what is transliterated as 'j' can also be pronounced as [z].



At this point you may be wondering how or why কুকুৰনেচীয়া kukurnesiyaa and নেজ nez are related. I myself am not sure what the -iya does here and am assuming that it's some sort of attributive marker. However, most linguists will quickly see the connection between the [s] in kukurnesiyaa and the [z] nez - the difference between the two sounds is just a matter of whether your vocal folds are vibrating or not (the former being a 'voiceless' sound, and the latter a 'voiced' one with your vocal folds vibrating).

And there you have it, wolves are literally 'dog-tailed tigers' in Assamese.

One might wonder then if Assamese বঘ bagh then refers to any 'big scary animal that might eat you' with the prototypical example being 'a big orange cat with black stripes'. Of course, the danger for language learners like myself is to interpret these compounds too literally. I mean, most English speakers wouldn't perceive the food item 'hot dog' as a sizzling canine - the meat is never dog, and they're still hot dogs even when they get cold!

So with that in mind, how can it be fair for me to assume Assamese speakers perceive wolves as big striped cats with dog tails, amusing as it may be!

Monday, October 22, 2012

Million Dollar Bill

The past two week I've been receiving messages from an Assamese guy who used to work at the guest house I was staying in in Guwahati. (I've found out that he's since been fired.)

It started with half a dozen missed calls on my phone after I'd just gotten back from a trip to Nagaland. He then left a message asking if I could give him a minute of my time.

When I rang him back, he asked me if I 'knew about a million dollars'. It took a while before he told me that his brother had in his possession a 'US one million dollar note'. He wanted me to see if it was real or a 'duplicate'.

Although novelty million dollar notes are allowed and have been printed out (according to Wikipedia), but none are legal tender. I told him there was no such thing as a 'US million dollar bill', and that you can't have a duplicate of something that isn't real.

A few days ago, I got this second message:

Brow right now i m having 1 million doler... (united kingdom) brow can u seck that note pz.. pz met me...i will go to ur place

[Note: seck means 'check' - 'ch' becomes 's' as a result of influence from Assamese]

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

I come from a land down under

One of the first things I learn to say in a foreign language is how to say, "I'm from..." or "I come from...", mainly because one of the first things people ask me is where I'm from. It's also a reasonable useful phrase for any language learner.

However, I find the phrase tricky to learn for 2 reasons. The first one is probably more specific to the geographically displaced person that I am. I usually say "I come from Singapore but live in Australia", even if my friends in Nepal and India will typically introduce me as their friend from Australia. It just seems less troublesome when I'm travelling in Asia and Europe, especially since I don't look like what many people expect an Australian to look like i.e. white, nor do I sound particularly Australian (although I did meet an American lady who insisted I had an Australian accent, which I found rather puzzling).

But discounting any potential geographic confusion of one's origins, the phrase is potentially problematic if you're asking for a literal translation in another language. I've found a few times that when I ask people how to say "I come from...", they often give me a sentence that is better translated as 'I am coming from...' or 'I have come from...', which tells the hearer the last place I visited, as opposed to my country / land of origin.

I suspect it's translating the verb 'come' that throws my tutors off - they're trying to convey the meaning of motion, when the English doesn't actually convey this.

Using the verb venir 'to come' works fine in French, although it's possible to just use the verb 'to be' and a preposition:
Je viens de Singapour 'I come from Singapore.'
Je suis de Singapour. 'I am from Singapore.'

But in Russian, what I'd say is:
Я из Сингапура ya iz Singapur-a 'I am from Singapore.' (lit. 'I from Singapore' with a preposition and no verb meaning 'to be')
I can't even think of a verb corresponding to 'come' that would be appropriate here. If I did use one here, I'd feel like I was talking about recently arriving from Singapore.

Similarly, in (Lower) Assamese I was first taught:
[would love to put the Assamese text here at some point]
Moy Singapur-pora ahisu.
(forgive the transliteration, this was based on my own transcriptions, and I have a LOT of trouble with the back vowels)

And in Sumi:
Niye Singapur lono ighi va.

However, both literally mean, 'I have come from Singapore.' (or to match the word order, 'I Singapore from have come'). The form of the verb 'to come' ahisu in (Lower) Assamese and the use of va with the verb ighi 'to come' in Sumi are used in sentences that one would typically translate as being in the perfect aspect in English. I suspect that both sentences suggest that I have recently arrived from Singapore, which is not the intended meaning.

Rather, in order to convey the meaning of origin, it might be necessary in languages to say something like 'I am Singaporean.' In Chinese, I would probably say:
我是新加坡人。
wo shi xinjiapo ren
(where 人 ren means 'person'.)

In Sumi, the equivalent of this would be:
Niye Singapur-mi.
with the suffix -mi meaning 'person' and no verb meaning 'to be'.

Alternatively, what I've learn to say in Nepali, is:
मेरो देश सिंगापुर हो, तर म ऑस्ट्रेलियामा बास्छु।
mero des Singaapur ho, tara ma Australiya-maa baaschhu
which literally means 'My country (des) is Singapore, but I live in Australia.'

Similarly, in Assamese, I can say:
mor dex Singapore, kintu moi bortoman Australiat thaku
'My country is Singapore, but nowadays I live in Australia.'

Of course, this often assumes that your country of origin is the same as your current nationality, which is not always the case. However, things are never that simple - some people I know who read this blog certainly have more complicated geographical origins!

I'd therefore be interested to hear of other ways to introduce where you come from in these and other languages. I'd also be interested to know why people choose to introduce themselves in this particular way.

Eventually, I suppose I will start introducing myself as being 'Australian'. Although I'm more likely to give a nod to Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton and say, "I am Australian", instead of "I come from a land down under."

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Language learning: Dialogues (I)

Most language learning textbooks these days include a dialogue (or two) in each chapter, along with a vocabulary list, followed by some discussion of grammar. The dialogues are usually based on some assumed needs analysis of the learner, and focus on common scenarios language learners are likely to encounter, in the order in which learners are presumed to encounter them. For this reason, many books I've seen start with a 'Meeting at the airport' scene.

There's the typical greeting, followed by a brief introduction (simply one's name), and sometimes talk about luggage. Now while this all seems a reasonable way to start the book, I really don't like this kind of dialogue. In my experience, if someone's coming to pick me up at the airport, they're either family, friends or a business associate, all of whom would probably speak the same language as you. (Sometimes it's just the driver who may not speak the same language, but none of the dialogues I've seen cover things like 'Are you the driver?' or 'Did [insert name] send you?') One might argue that such lessons still incorporate elements of 'real world' interaction like greetings and introductions, but my point is, why the need for such a contrived environment?

During my first Assamese lesson, my first tutor had prepared a whole dialogue based on her own needs analysis for me - we had met the previous day to discuss the tutoring over tea. She said, we would go through the dialogue, memorise it and then look at some grammar points.

I have nothing against memorisation. I spend a lot of time memorising new vocabulary and set phrases. But I'm dead set against memorising dialogue, unless of course I'm in a play. For certain topics, like when I'm introducing where I'm from and talking about my family, the act of repetition naturally makes me memorise my little spiel. Anyway, the dialogue my tutor had prepared went exactly like this (in English):

(The situation assumes I'm walking into the office for research students in the linguistics department for the first time and meet someone sitting at her desk, who incidentally is my tutor.)

Me: Hello.
Tutor: I'm [tutor's name]. What is your name?
Me: My name is Amos [my tutor actually wrote my full name, but I argued that people there wouldn't be able to tell which was my first and last name]. Do you work here?
Tutor: No, I don't work in this department. I work in the ELT department.
Me: Ok.
Tutor: I teach in the ELT department and at present am doing my PhD. What do you do?
Me: I'm a research scholar. [...]

What followed was then a long description (not all of it correct) of what she thought I did, like saying 'I'm doing a PhD.' I had to stop the dialogue at that point and tell her that this wasn't what I wanted out of my language class.

For one thing, the scenario was just not something I was ever going to encounter. I'd already met the people in the office and our meeting was nothing like what she had written for me. Then there was the issue of having her write out what she assumed was my introduction, without getting the facts right first. I told her that I would actually like to compose my own introduction, and she could judge it to see if it was culturally and linguistically appropriate. Finally, the dialogue just didn't sound natural to me. I know there are are cross-cultural differences, but I've tried writing dialogue for plays in English, and it never sounds natural to me when I go back over what I've written.

Anyway, whatever it was, I explained to my tutor that I already had a long list of things I wanted to be able to express in Assamese, and a number of scenarios like catching an autorickshaw and paying for stuff at a shop that I really wanted to cover. It wasn't as if I was sitting in a class with 10 other people and had to follow a set syllabus - the advantage of having a private tutor is being able to dictate, within reasonable boundaries, what you want to learn and when you want to learn it. IF you know what it is you want to know. For me, having been in Nepal and having learnt a little bit of Nepali, I already had a good idea of the situations I wanted to be comfortable in in Assamese.

Friday, January 28, 2011

Some people want to be teachers

I remember a small incident from the year I spent on exchange in France. I was in Lourdes for a few days and I recall I was looking for a cemetery as I was coming down from the fort. I found a lady at the tourist counter and asked her "Excusez-moi madame, mais où est-ce que la cimetière?" ('Excuse me madame, where is 'la' cemetery?)

Her reply was "Non non monsieur, c'est "le" cimetière." ('No sir, it's 'le' cemetery.')

Now I had mistaken the noun cimetière as being feminine (like a number of other nouns ending in -ière) that needs the article la, when in actual fact it is a masculine noun. Of course, at the time I was tired, hungry and really not in the mood for a French lesson, but it's something that has stuck with me since, and I haven't forgotten the gender of the noun cimetière. It wasn't the first time I had been corrected by a complete stranger in France, and it's something I've actually come to appreciate.


But there are ways to teach and there are ways to teach. Fast forward to this week, here in the Guwahati University guest house. A few days ago I met a visiting Assamese writer from the nearby town of Tezpur (where I'm heading tomorrow). The instant he found out I was learning Assamese, he started telling others at the guest house that the only reason I came to Assam was to learn Assamese, which just isn't true. Making conversation has also been difficult with him - he's quite pretentious and is certainly very proud of himself and where he comes from. To him, Assam is the most beautiful state in India, and Tezpur is the most beautiful town in Assam.

But what really got to me was when he started talking to me about a certain kind of banana that they gave us at breakfast yesterday. It's a local variety that they've been feeding the guests here (or trying to feed) that's quite starchy and has the texture closer to a plaintain. It's not very sweet either and feels like it needs to be cooked first. Suffice to say, I really don't like it. The Assamese writer started telling me it was very good Assamese banana and very good for digestion.

I refused to comment.

Then he said to me, 'In Assamese, they are called malbhog. Malbhog. Say it.'

The first thought in my head was actually, "F*ck you, you pretentious wanker". I mean, who the hell did this guy think he was? But in the end I mumbled something with my mouth full, which made him repeat what he'd just said.

So rather than continuing the conversation, I just took a small bite out of my malbhog and left the rest on my plate for him to see.

(And in case you're wondering, I didn't actually remember the name of the banana after this conversation. I had to ask my tutor for the name again.)

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Vowels: Does /j/ + /a/ = /æ/ ?

This is something that has been bugging me a little bit since I was in Nepal back in October last year. It concerns the orthographic representation of the English vowel /æ/ in words like taxi /tæksi/ when they are borrowed into Nepali.

The word for taxi in Nepali is ट्याक्सि, which transliterated gives Tyaaksi, where T represents a voiceless unaspirated retroflex stop (the tip of the tongue is slightly further back than when you produce a normal alveolar 't' sound in English). The appearance of the retroflex is not surprising here as English alveolar stops are usually borrowed into Indic languages like Nepali and Hindi as retroflex stops. (Assamese is the exception here as it has lost its retroflex stop series.)

The Nepali spelling suggests that the word is pronounced /ʈjaksi/ (/j/ represents the sound 'y'). My friend Sara insisted that Nepali speakers would palatalise (produce a particular speech sound while simultaneously raising the body of the tongue towards the roof of the mouth) the first consonant when saying the word and her theory was that they were trying to follow the American pronunciation of the word 'taxi'. (Correct me if I got this wrong Sara.)

I wasn't convinced with that explanation. For one thing, I would often hear speakers say something closer to /ʈɛksi/, without palatalising the first consonant and with the vowel /ɛ/, which is much more similar to /æ/. I also didn't see why Nepali would borrow English /t/ as a palatalised retroflex stop /ʈj/ since English /t/ isn't palatalised in this context. Also, I thought it counterintuitive that speakers would follow an American English pronunciation to guide their spelling, given the influence of British English across the Indian sub-continent.

Instead, my theory was that the combination of the letters 'y' and 'a' (या) represent the vowel /æ/ (or a close approximation like /ɛ/) and are not pronounced like /ja/. Unfortunately, other things came up (like 2 months in Nagaland), and I wasn't able to get more evidence to support my hypothesis.

Then today on the bus back to the Guwahati University Guest House, I found myself staring at the sign for the Volkswagen showroom while we were stuck in traffic. While I'm not as familiar with the Assamese script, the main thing I noticed was that the syllable corresponding to 'wa' in Volkswagen was written as ওয়া, which would be transliterated as 'oya'. Now, I'm assuming that the transliteration of Volkswagen in the Assamese script is based on the English pronunciation of the word and not the German one - the presence of 'o' in 'oya' suggests that it is trying to approximate /w/, not /v/. If this is true, then it provides evidence from another Indic language that a combination of the letters 'y' and 'a' are used to represent the English /æ/, as in 'wagon' /wægən/, or a close approximation of that sound.

I have to take a photo of that Volkswagen sign next time I pass by. Once I do and have evidence that Assamese does in fact use 'ya' to represent /æ/, I might try and confirm that Nepali uses the same strategy to represent this vowel.

(Note: standard Hindi avoids this problem altogether because it has the vowel /ɛ/ in its phoneme inventory, which is close to /æ/. It is often transliterated as 'ai' even though it is not a diphthong, e.g. in टैक्सी Taiksii 'taxi'. Also, the vowel in Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif's last name is not pronounced as a diphthong in standard Hindi.)

Saturday, January 15, 2011

Counting in Indic languages

To commemorate my 100th post on this blog (yes, it's been a hundred) and the fact that I'm learning some Assamese here in Guwahati, I thought I'd talk about learning to count in an Indic language - basically any one of the many Indo-European languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent, including Hindi, Bengali, Nepali and Assamese.

Now I'm not talking about their numeral systems, since most of us use a derivation of the Hindu or Hindu-Arabic numeral system on a daily basis, which is a decimal system that uses only 10 digits from 0 to 9. What I'm talking about are the names for the numbers in these languages.

Now non-native speakers learning to count in English from 1 to 100, technically only need to memorise the names of the numbers from 1 to 20, then every multiple of 10 till 100. That's because after 20, we simply say 20 'twenty' and 1 'one' to get 21 'twenty one'; 20 'twenty' and 2 'two' to get 22 'twenty two' and so on. However, they still need to learn what 11-19 are since we don't say 'ten one' for 11, or 'ten two' for 12. They also need to learn the names for the multiples of 10 since these are not entirely regular - we don't say 'three-ty' for 30 or 'five-ty' for 50. (Sure, you might say there's a pattern with 40 and 60-90, but it's not as regular as say, 21-29.)

What non-native speakers find learning to count in Indic languages is that while there are some patterns like the kind you find from 60 'sixty' to 90 'ninety' in English, most of the time it seems like you just have to memorise the name of every single number from 1 to 100.

For instance, if we look at 5, 15, 25, 35 ... 85, 95 in Hindi:

5 पाँच paaNch (N indicates nasalisation on the preceding vowel)
15 पन्द्रह pandrah
25 पच्चीस pachchiis          (20 is बीस biis)
35 पैंतीस paiNtiis              (30 is तीस tiis)
45 पैंतालीस paiNtaaliis      (40 is चालीस chaaliis)
55 पचपन pachapan          (50 is पचास pachaas)
65 पैंसठ paiNsaTh             (60 is साठ saaTh)
75 पचहत्तर pachahattara     (70 is सत्तर sattara)
85 पचासी pachaasii            (80 is अस्सी assii)
95 पंचानबे paNchaanabe     (90 is नब्बे nabbe)

You can sort of see a pattern, but it's not quite possible to analyse each form morphologically and tease out the part that means 'five units'. Goodness also knows when to decide when to nasalise the vowel or not. Also, look at the words for 25 (pachchiis) and 50 (pachaas) - I always get their Nepali counterparts mixed up.

Assamese isn't much different. Here're the numbers from 1-12 in Assamese - which is as far as I'll go for now since it'll allow me to tell the time. I'll probably get up to 31 so I can give dates, and also learn a few more multiples of 10.

এক ek
দুই dui
তিনি tini
চাৰি sari
পাঁচ pans [pãs]
ছয় sôy [sɔj]
সাত xaat
আঠ aath
[nɔ]
10 দহ dôh
11 এঘাৰ egharô
12 বাৰ barô

When I come up with a good way to memorise the numbers from 0 to 100 in such languages I'll let you know. In the meantime, thank goodness people here in Guwahati also use English numbers.