Animals at the Jew

Two days ago I was running around Kohima town looking for three things: white (banner) cloth, cellotape, and red sealing wax. Why? Remember the wood plate I tried to send last year? It ended up getting sent back to my friends' in Kohima because the post office failed to give me a customs declaration form to sign.

After what looked like a bumpy ride, the plate got chipped pretty badly so I bought a new one. This time, I wanted to package it better, so my friends in Kohima suggested I purchase these three things and do the packaging at home. And yes, it's still common practice in South Asia to use red sealing wax when you're making a parcel.

The cloth and cellotape were no problem, but I needed red sealing wax and none of the stationery shops I visited carried any. Eventually one guy (who was probably of Hindi-speaking background), told me to go to the 'Air to Jed' shop a little further down on NST road.

Air to Jed?

It took a few seconds, but somehow it clicked - I was looking for the 'A to Z' stationery shop.

There are two issues here. One, in standard varieties of English, the letter 'A' is pronounced as a diphthong like [eɪ]. This guy was saying producing with a monophthong [ɛ], which I heard as 'air'.

The second issue was that he substituted the 'z' sound [z] for the 'j' sound [ʤ]. This is actually quite common in widely spoken Indic languages, including Hindi, Nepali and Assamese. In these languages, the 'z' and 'j' sounds are what we call in free variation, meaning that if you swap one sound for the other, it doesn't change the meaning of a word, nor does it make the word nonsensical. For example, the word for 'table' in Hindi can be pronounced as both mez and mej. In the Bollywood film Salaam Namaste (which is set in Melbourne), one of the characters constantly pronounces 'exactly' as 'egg-Jack-Lee'.

Similarly, to this man giving me directions, 'Zed' and 'Jed' are effectively the same word.

Of course, to native English speakers, this can have even more humorous effects. A few weeks ago in Assam, I had to sit through a whole conversation with a friend who was telling me about the how he used to live next to the 'Guwahati Jew' and a soccer ball once accidentally went into the 'Jew'.

Thank goodness my time in Nepal had already taught me that in many parts of South Asia, a 'Jew' is where animals are kept.

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.

1 এক ek
2 দুই dui
3 তিনি tini
4 চাৰি sari
5 পাঁচ pans [pãs]
6 ছয় sôy [sɔj]
7 সাত xaat
8 আঠ aath
9 ন nô [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.