Visit to Satoi (I)

Two days ago, I went with Ab. and her father, the Rev. Yev., to the village of Satoi in the southern part of the Zunheboto district. Given that he's the head of all the district churches he often travels out of Zunheboto town. I've read that Satoi was really beautiful, and when we heard he was going, Ab. asked if we could tag along to do some sightseeing (we wouldn't get in the way).

So on Saturday, we got up bright and early to head south towards Satoi. The road wasn't great, and I've heard they're doing reparation work on it, mainly because one of the ministers in the State Government is from Satoi (although now that he flies there by helicopter, who knows how the road will turn out).

The worst bit was a little landslide where we all got out to walk, except for poor Subu our driver who had to get the car across.





Our first stop was for breakfast in the village of Ghokhüvi (pronounced quite close to 'Rock-a-vee', and if you pronounce your 'r's like in French). The 'ü' is a high central vowel that is often produced as a schwa in this position.

The church in Ghoküvi.


Arriving with the reverend, we were ushered to the outside area of the house of who I'm assuming is the local pastor and given delicious Sumi sho or 'Sumi bread' made with rice flour and lightly fried - a lighter version of the shel roti I was fed in Nepal during Tihar. Then there was dried innards (mostly liver and some intestines) which I was told are made by boiling them, then drying them, then frying them. Very nice.



The village was busy preparing for this big conference of all the Sumi Baptist churches starting on the 9th of this month. In the outside area of most houses, people were setting up large wooden structures to house all the people set to visit later in the week.



And after breakfast, we were off to Satoi, a little bit further up the hill.

G20 sherpas

This was something I'd seen about a month back on TV. It was a news report about the G20 summit in Seoul and the 'G20 Sherpas'. The BBC describes them as "the faceless diplomats who lay the groundwork for high-profile international meetings such as the G8 and the G20."

While the BBC website writes 'G20 sherpas', what annoyed me a little with this news report, was that the word 'sherpa' was written with a capital 'S', so the label given to the interviewees was 'G20 Sherpa'. A quick search on Google shows that a number of other websites have also spelt it as 'Sherpa'. Some, like the BBC have written 'G20 sherpa' and some have written 'G20 'sherpa'' in inverted commas. (Note: the spell check on this blog site is also telling me that 'sherpa' without a capital 'S' is incorrect.)

Now I don't want to be one of those people who gets indignant for other people, but what annoys me about the use of 'G20 Sherpa' is that in this context, the use of the word 'sherpa' is reduced simply to an occupation. The same BBC article writes, "Sherpas are the tough and resilient Nepalese guides who help mountaineers scale Himalayan peaks."

It's fair enough that this is the common English definition for the word 'sherpa' - prior to to my visit to Solukhumbu or hearing about my friend Sara's research, I would have just used the word in a similar way. And if it's been borrowed into English as a kind of an occupation, then 'sherpa' should be fine. But then, the word 'Sherpa' means so much more than the job of 'person from Nepal to assists mountain climbers', since it actually refers to the ethnic, cultural and linguistic group.

So unless one of those G20 sherpas is actually Sherpa, it really should be written 'G20 sherpa'.

'We dual'

The pronoun system of Sumi is given below. As you can see, pronouns in Sumi are marked for singular, dual and plural number.

SINGULAR
ni / i 'I' (these carry low tone)
no 'you' (this carries low tone)
pa 'he/she' (li 'she' also exists, but is not used often)

DUAL
ikujo 'we two'
okujo 'you two'
pama / küma 'they two'

PLURAL
ningu 'we all (more than two)' (ni- carries mid tone)
nongu 'you all (more than two)' (no- carries mid tone)
panongu 'they all (more than two)'

In addition, you can specify the number of people in a group, e.g.niküthü (ni-küthü 'we-three') 'we three', nobidi (no-bidi 'you-four') 'you four'.

It was therefore interesting to hear (and to be able to see the mistake when) a friend's 3 year old son pointed to a photo of himself and his father and said, 'nikini', which literally means 'we-two'. He was quickly corrected, the pronoun ikujo being the expected form here.

I'm no child language acquisition specialist, so I can't comment on this as such, but this would suggest that the dual forms are the most marked ones in the pronoun set (similar to English nouns with irregular plural forms) which are learnt after the other pronouns.

Not for the love of syllables

I had an interesting conversation last night with Ab.'s dad last night. He mentioned something that he had said to me last year that I had forgotten. It concerned the syllable structure of English and Sumi. I thought I had misunderstood him the first time, but last night seemed to confirm my original impression.

So the conversation went something like this: in English, we have the word love (we're talking about the verb here), which is monosyllabic (has one syllable). In Sumi, the word for 'love' is kimiye, which is trisyllabic (has three syllables). However, this is actually usually pronounced as disyllabic [kim.ye], with [ki.mi.ye] only appearing in careful speech. (My own belief is that Sumi has these things called 'sesquisyllables' consisting of a weak or 'minor' syllable followed by a strong or 'full' syllable, but let's not go into that.) The point was that we 'needed' to to somehow make the Sumi word for 'love' monosyllabic or coin a monosyllabic equivalent, because the word in English was monosyllabic.

I'm sure most people would find the very thought of this absurd - afterall, all languages have their own syllable structure - but it just goes to show people's attitudes towards English here and how much power English as a language wields within such a, dare I say, post-colonial discourse.

And there are other examples: Sumi makes a meaningful contrast between the voiceless aspirated and voiceless unaspirated post-alveolar affricates /ʧ/ and /ʧh/, which have been written as 'ch' and 'chh' in the orthographic system. (Most English speakers who say the word 'church' will notice that the first sound is accompanied by a strong puff of air. This is a voiceless aspirated post-alveolar affricate. However, most Singaporean English speakers probably wouldn't have that strong a puff of air, and the sound will actually be closer to the voiceless unaspirated affricate.) Recently there's been a move to change 'chh' to 'tch', because in English we have words like 'pitch' where the same sound is represented by 'tch'. Never mind that words like 'teach' and 'church' also exist where the sound is written with 'ch', or that English does not even have a meaningful contrast between the aspirated and unaspirated affricates (so if you said 'church' without that extra puff of air, it wouldn't affect the meaning of the word). The move from 'chh' to 'tch' therefore seems rather pointless to me, unless you're trying to make the language's writing system closer to English's own crazy orthography.

Burmese snack

Last week I was given this little packet of food (?) that I was told had come from Burma. The Burmese writing on the packet seemed to confirm this - not so sure about the anime style pictures.

Me being me, I just had to try it, despite the fact that the contents looked more like pet food pellets. I'm still trying to figure out what on earth I ate. It was an odd mix of sweet and a savoury...

Language vs Culture

At the Ahuna festival two weeks ago I met Ab. (click here for her blog). She'd just come back to Zunheboto after spending some time abroad, including a few years in the UK. Importantly, she'd heard about the World Oral Literature Project (WOLP) and had even contacted Mark Turin regarding the documentation of Sumi stories. One of the reasons I'd come back to Zunheboto (apart from the festival) had been to find native speakers who were willing and able to do documentary work on their own language, with the aims of producing a dictionary (and possibly a grammar). Incidentally, I had considered applying to the WOLP for funding as well - mostly so I could return to conduct a few workshops, but I never imagined I'd meet anyone who would be interested in recording texts right now.

So it was incredibly fortunate that I met her here in Zunheboto. We brought up the topic of doing a documentation project with H S R., the chairman of the Sumi Language Academy and the Sumi Cultural Association, who happens to be one of the most respected members of the community. And somehow, in the past week and a half, we've come up with a proposal to document a number of traditional songs and stories. These songs are rarely performed nowadays and only a few members of the older generation are familiar with them and even fewer are able to compose new ones.

We decided to do the project under the auspices of the Sumi Cultural Association, since the project will be looking at activities deemed 'cultural'. Without going into too much detail, we've spent three out of the past five days visting schools and offices (I've lost count of the number) seeking the support of important members of the community both financially and in spirit. I've also had more milk tea and amixi (snacks like biscuits that go with tea) than I would've liked. We're also planning a trip to Kohima later this week to meet with other officials to seek their support (and hopefully I'll be able to see some things at the Hornbill Festival too).

Now there are some members of the community whom I had spoken to about a dictionary project in the hopes that I could find someone to train to use the software and do a basic linguistic analysis of the entries - I personally would prefer a native speaker who can use a computer to do the dictionary than myself since a) I'm not a native speaker of the language b) there are capable young people who are proficient in both English and Sumi and c) there's a lot of administrative trouble for me to physically remain in the state and the country. In any case, no one suitable had been found, so I suggested that once I had secured some funding, we could put an ad up in the paper later next year and that I could return to do the workshops.

That all seemed fine until these same people heard about the documentation project. Suddenly, they're telling me not to forget the dictionary. One person went as far as to say that I should be doing the dictionary, not the 'cultural documentation' project. This is all in spite of my reassurance that such a documentation project will feed into a dictionary - stories and songs are composed of words afterall! So now I find myself in an odd conflict between 'language' and 'culture', which to me is completely ridiculous because they're both so inextricably intertwined.

I'm also not sure what they expect of me with regards to the dictionary. Over the past two weeks, I've had one-two hour sessions with a member of the Sumi Literature Board who's insisted on sitting me down and going through lists of animal names, unsure of their English translations, and simply describing them without any pictures! I've tried to hint that this really isn't the proper methodology for doing a comprehensive study of zoological terms, but apparently there's a list of plant and fruit names coming tomorrow...

At the moment I suppose I have to reassure these people that I'm not abandoning the dictionary (and I'm not), while at the same time looking for ways to implement a long term project even when I'm not physically present, which was the initial goal anyway. Ideally, I'd like to be back next year for 3-4 months, but it'll depend on funding and whether I get permission to remain in the state for that long a period of time.

Potato smasher

The other day I was asked by a shopkeeper,"Khuuno ghami kea?", which translates roughly as 'Which village are you from?' (lit. 'Whose village person (are you)?') The morpheme gha is also found in lagha which translates as 'clan' and mi is a common Tibeto-Burman noun root meaning 'person'.

Since I don't clearly don't have a village (or clan) and didn't really understand the question, my friend kindly replied on my behalf that I was aluchhephomi, much to the amusement of everyone in earshot. The word can be analysed morphologically as alu 'potato', chhepho 'to break asunder' and mi 'person'. So literally, 'potato smasher'. People here jokingly refer to people who don't know which village they (or their family) are from as aluchhephomi, people from this fabled distant village where the inhabitants smash potatoes, as opposed to doing something useful with them, like say... cooking?

Given my clanless and villageless status here, I guess for the timebeing I'm happy to embrace my potato smashing heritage.