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.
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.
