Writing Hebrew and Arabic the wrong way

A few weeks ago, I visited the Singapore Night Safari with a friend who was visiting from Australia. We spotted some mugs at the souvenir shop which featured the names of 'popular' animals translated into various languages. Incidentally, this friend of mine is also a speaker of Hebrew, and quickly pointed out the glaring error on all of the mugs.

For those of you who can read Hebrew, it's a very obvious one. The word for lion in Hebrew is אריה (ari) and not הירא. While the makers of this mug have written the Hebrew word using the correct letters, they have failed to realise that unlike English, Hebrew is written from right to left, not left to right. The equivalent of this in English would be like spelling lion as noil.

Similarly, for 'African Elephant', we should have פיל אפּריקני (pil afriykaniy). Here, the word order is also incorrect, which is expected since the writer has gone from left to right, giving us the equivalent of tnahpele nacirfa.

Finally, for the 'Black Rhinoceros' mug, we should expect to see קרנף שחור (karnaf shah'or) - well you can't really see the word for 'black' in the photo, but you can see the word for 'rhino' קרנף karnaf.

Take note that in Hebrew, some letters have different forms depending on whether they occur at the end of a word or not. One example is the letter which represents corresponds to the English letter 'f'. In Hebrew it is written as פּ in the middle of a word, but as ף at the end of a word. On the mug we find the word-final form of this letter right at the end of word, if Hebrew were written from left to right. This suggests that the makers of the mug did not start with a Romanised transliteration of the Hebrew words, but translated them directly into Hebrew written in the Hebrew script (most likely using an online translator). Somehow in the editing process, whether by accident or on purpose, they moved the letters around so that they now go from left to right.

On a similar note, a picture by Bartosz Ostrowski, a Polish photographer and illustrator, has been making the rounds on Tumblr.

(Click here to see the picture.)

A number of commentators have pointed out that the Arabic for 'meow', naw naw has been incorrectly written in the Arabic script. The picture gives ون ون, when it should be نونو. Like the Hebrew script, the Arabic script is also read from right to left. Arabic letters also have different forms depending on whether they occur at the start of the word, in the middle, or at the end, and if they occur in isolation. The mistake in the picture is that the words have been written using the 'isolated' forms of the letters, and written from left to right.

Going back to the animal mugs, I do hope the manufacturers eventually realise their mistake and fix the Hebrew translations. However, given that the mistake was the reason my friend bought one as a souvenir, it may be in their best interests not to correct these errors...

Expressing the agent in Chinese

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, since I saw this advertisement at my uncle's clinic here in Singapore. It's an ad for some type of hair loss treatment.

In English, the ad reads: "Male pattern hair loss can be treated".

In contrast, the Chinese (Mandarin) ad reads: 医生可以治疗你的脱发问题。yīshēng kěyǐ zhìliáo nǐ de tuōfà wèntí which can be roughly translated as 'The doctor can treat your hair loss problem.'

For now, let's just ignore the fact that English version obligatorily requires some sort of article with doctor and that doctor must be specified as being singular or plural, while the Chinese one does not. (Given the ad's location in a clinic where it was in full view of waiting patients, I interpreted it as referring to the doctor working in the clinic that day, whom the waiting patient was going to see.) Also ignore the fact that the English one specifies this as a male problem, while the Chinese one assumes that the reader is male.

What's important to note is that the Mandarin version actually specifies the agent, the person who will be undertaking the action, 医生 yīshēng 'doctor'. On the other hand, the English version uses a passive construction where the agent no longer needs to be mentioned, though it could be if we wanted to, by simply adding the phrase by the doctor. By using the passive voice in English, one can omit the agent / doer of the action and still construct a grammatical sentence. This is one common use of the passive voice in English, and a fairly important one, so please ignore 'blanket rules' that state to 'avoid the passive voice' at all costs - it does have its uses!

With the current buzz on language and its potential effects on thought and behaviour, and given that only the Mandarin one expressly mentions an agent, the 'doctor', I would be tempted to ask this question: If the treatment fails, would a Mandarin speaker who has read the advertisement in Mandarin be more likely to blame the doctor than an English speaker who has read it in English?

The obvious hypothesis would be that a Mandarin speaker would be more likely to assign blame to the doctor if the treatment fails than an English speaker would. Why? Because in the Chinese version, 医生 'doctor' is explicitly mentioned.

Now, if this hypothesis were proven correct, could one then conclude that it was due to some fundamental difference in the way that Mandarin and English are structured or view the world?

I would definitely say, no.

The problem is, the English version could easily have read: A doctor can treat your hair loss problem, using the active voice which means that the agent has to be mentioned / one must mention the agent. Mandarin also has a way of marking the equivalent of the passive using 被 bèi (see here for more info), although writing 脱发问题,可以治疗 would be acceptable, and would be closer to 'Hair loss problem can be treated', with 脱发问题 'hair loss problem' placed at the front as a topic.

You might then say that it is more common in Mandarin Chinese to mention the agent here - a Google search for 脱发问题可以被治疗 'hair can be treated' (using 被 bèi)  doesn't come up with identical results, while most results mention some sort of force / process, e.g. 头发移植 'hair transplants', 锌 'zinc' and 中草药 'Chinese herbal medicine' that might cure hair loss problems.

The problem is, there are numerous reasons why 医生 'doctor' was mentioned explicitly in the Chinese version, and not the English one. One reason might be a cultural expectation among Mandarin speakers (or in the case of Singapore, older Hokkien and Teochew speakers who also know Mandarin) that it is up to the doctor to help them. Older Chinese speakers, who are less likely to know English, are more likely from a generation that held doctors in the highest esteem and would not question their actions. By mentioning 医生 'doctor', the copywriter / translator of the advertisement in Chinese could simply be tapping into the revered status accorded doctors, since this would likely promote sales. Another reason might be that the copywriter simply felt the need to be more explicit in directing Chinese speaking patients to the doctor for help.

Clearly, it would be impossible to simply compare two versions of a sentence in two different languages and start making hypotheses about the effects of language on thought and behaviour. However, I thought it would be a nice way to illustrate some of the problems faced by researchers in this field, especially if we start considering a feature (like an agent) that could be omitted in a language, but are often not. Is such a tendency the result of the structure of a language affecting thought, or is it thought and cultural expectations that result in this particular use of language / stylistic choice?

In order to exclude the possibility of the latter, we go to Roman Jakobson's quote “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”. It would therefore be more fruitful to look at features of English that must be mentioned, like the use of either an indefinite or definitie article with singular nouns in English or the marking of all countable nouns as either singular or plural - all features that Chinese does not oblige its speakers to mention.

[On a related note, here's a link to Lena Boroditsky's article in the Wall Street Journal on her work with English, Japanese and Spanish speakers and the perception of blame (23/07/2010): Lost in Translation
Here's a Language Log post that critically examines this study (26/07/2010): Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame]

'Futureless' languages?

[If you've come to this post because you're wondering if a particular language is 'futureless' or not, skip down right to the bottom for a summary of the various points I make in this fairly lengthy post.]

This post follows on from my previous one about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. To recap, Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak may affect your savings behaviour, depending on how your language grammatically encodes statements about the future. My point in my first post was that he was drawing on research that suggests a link between language and thought, the hypothesis being that speakers of a certain language must pay attention to particular features of the world around them on a habitual basis because the language they speak makes it obligatory for them to mention such features.

My concerns about his work however, start when I look at Chen's application of these ideas to the tense systems of the languages in his study, and how these languages have been analysed for tense.

'Futureless' languages?

The term 'futureless' languages comes up in Chen's work (although he actually rejects it in favour of a different term) and deserves some clarification. Contrary to what the TEDx talk description says of 'languages without a concept for the future', in Chen's work, he cites Östen Dahl's definition of 'futureless languages":

Dahl defines “futureless” languages as those which do not require “the obligatory use [of grammaticalized future-time reference] in (main clause) prediction-based contexts”. In this framework, a prediction is a statement about the future that has no intentional component. (footnote 3, p. 1)

[Click for a copy of: Dahl, Öster. 2000. Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe.]

I'll explain why Chen needs to add the part about 'no intentional component' a bit later on. What is important to note here is that the term 'futureless' language does not refer to 'a language without a concept for the future', but rather to a language that does not obligatorily force its speakers to use some sort of grammatical marking e.g. a future tense inflection on a verb, when describing an event situated in the future. For this reason, Chen actually uses the more neutral term 'weak future-time reference (FTR) language' instead.

Mandarin Chinese, the main inspiration behind Chen's work, is a prime example of a 'futureless' language in this discussion, because it does not typically oblige its speakers to mark for futurity (most obviously because verbs are not obligatorily marked for future tense). However, this is not the same as saying that Mandarin does not have a concept of the future, or that it prevents its speakers from talking about events in the future. Mandarin speakers know that they can always use adverbs of time to specify if an event is going to take place in the future, e.g. 明天 míngtiān 'tomorrow'. It is simply not obligatory that speakers use such adverbs in order to construct grammatical sentences in Mandarin.

But the world isn't simply made up of 'futureless' and 'futured' languages, with nothing in between. And this analysis of Mandarin may not be entirely correct either, as we shall see later. If we look at the chapter on 'Future Tense' on the World Atlas of Language Structures Atlas, written by Viveka Velupillai and Östen Dahl himself, we find this observation:

"It is relatively rare for a language to totally lack any grammatical means for marking the future. Most languages have at least one or more weakly grammaticalized devices for doing so."

In fact, rather than thinking of two discrete categories, it might help (at this stage at least) to think of it more as a cline between a strong tendency to mark for 'futurity' and a weak tendency. In a study like Chen's, how does one draw the line between what is a 'futureless' and 'futured' language, which you may agree is a fairly subjective decision to make?


A European framework for a global study

Chen's solution to this question is to rely on a framework set out by the European Science Foundation’s Typology of Languages in Europe (EUROTYP) project which has criteria to determine what is a 'strong' future-time reference (FTR) language and what is a 'weak' FTR language. The guidelines state that the data collected for the project came from primary texts and responses to questionnaires developed by Dahl (see here for details), though I do not know how percentage of the data was textual and what was elicited through the questionnaire. Descriptive linguists will also be quick to point out the problems of relying too much on data collected using a questionnaire, since these often do not reflect actual language use.

Of greater concern is the inherently Eurocentric basis for comparing languages of the world in Chen's study. Chen states that, "to [his] knowledge, the EUROTYP project is the most extensive typological research program to study the cross-linguistic grammaticalization of FTR" (p. 9), but it does not change the fact that all the languages looked at are European. The survey itself cannot give a good idea of the kinds of grammatical categories one finds in languages all over the world. For instance, Kayardild, an indigenous language of Australia, can mark 'tense' on nouns - this may seem like a rare and extreme example, but it demonstrates that a set of criteria developed for only European languages will necessarily omit categories that may be found in other languages of the world.

To use an analogy from an article about Joe Heinreich's work on human behaviour by only looking at Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) people: it is like studying penguins while believing that one is learning insights applicable to all birds.


Wherefore the weather forecast?

This brings me to the analysis of English as a 'strong' FTR language. A number of people have raised similar examples to the one I'm about to use here to suggest that English is not a 'strong' FTR language:

(1) I am going to the shops now. (I'm on my way there as I say this.)
(2) I am going to the shops tomorrow. (I intend to go tomorrow.)

The main observation here is that in both sentences, the speaker is using a form that is described in English grammar as the 'present continuous' tense. However, while (1) refers to an event taking place at the time the speaker is uttering the sentence, i.e. 'the present' for the speaker; (2) refers to an event that might take place in the future.

[Note: Both (1) and (2) are perfectly grammatical and acceptable to native English speakers. One should not start thinking that (2) is wrong because it uses the 'present tense' to refer to the future! Think about the sentence I go to the shops every Friday. - you are using what is called the 'simple present' tense in English to describe an activity that you habitually do, not something that is happening at the very moment you utter the sentence.]

In both sentences, I could omit now and tomorrow and still have a grammatical sentence referring to an event in either the present or in the future. This shows English can actually be similar to Mandarin in not grammatically distinguishing between the present and the future on the verb, but through the use of an adverb of time.

So how does Chen get around this problem? He draws on an analysis by Bridget Copley, published in her 2009 book.

"Copley demonstrates that in English, “futurates” (sentences about future events with no FTR) can only be used to convey information about planned / scheduled / habitual events, or events which arise from law-like properties of the world." (footnote 9, p 4)

Using this argument, he then omits examples like the one I gave in (2), which describes a planned event. This is the main reason that has led Chen's study to focus on the language used in weather forecasts, since they do not have an intentional component to them. His own corpus study involved getting students to scour the internet for examples of weather forecasts in various languages and coding the verbs for FTR making.

This is one of my biggest problems with the research. The reason given for omitting the kinds of sentences that Copley lists is just not good enough. How can you just omit such a large chunk of data showcasing the way English speakers use English? What it looks like here is Chen trying to make English fit into the 'right' category so that it can then match his hypothesis / results.

On top of that, I've seen comments about how weather reports are not examples of typical or 'natural' speech, or how they may not even require the use of verbs, e.g. 'Tomorrow. Cloudy. Maximum temperature, 25 degrees." Chen notes that his study was confined to only languages that are widespread on the internet, but there is an underlying assumption that the 'weather report' as a genre exists for all language communities in his study. What about places that don't have a dependable meteorological service to announce the weather? Maybe a language might have a difference when talking about the weather that's likely later in the day and the weather that's likely in a few days' time?

Finally, even if Chen could convince me that weather reports are a reliable source of data for this cross-linguistic study, there is still one fundamental problem. If we consider the data that he has already collected (see Appendix B of his working paper), we find a set of 'verb ratios', referring to the percentage of verbs in a weather forecast about future weather which are grammatically marked as  future-referring. Some of these ratios are not 100% - this means that not all the verbs about future weather are grammatically marked as future-referring. Consequently, what we are looking at isn't obligatory future marking, but rather a tendency to do grammatical future marking. (Interestingly, Hungarian only has a 25% verb ratio, but it is still coded as being a strong FTR language.)

This goes against the basis for the hypothesis that an obligatory aspect of a language will make its speakers attend to it habitually every time they speak. Current research looking at the potential effects of language on thought is still in its nascent stage and it has necessarily been limited to testing hypotheses about obligatory features of a language. Once we start including a more general tendency to use a particular feature, the argument that it is the linguistic feature shaping how the speaker thinks becomes far less tenable: can we even tell if such a tendency is the result of the structure of a language affecting ways of thinking, or if it is something like a cultural norm that results in this particular use of language?


And if you're still in the mood...

As a final point, I should also point out that linguists rarely talk about 'tense' by itself, but 'tense, aspect and modality / mood' (TAM).  This is because languages rarely have markers just for 'tense', without conveying information about the other two. Simply put, 'tense' refers to the location of an event in time, 'aspect' refers to how the event relates to the flow of time, and 'modality' / 'mood' to the attitude of a speaker towards an event. (Click here for more info on the WALS site.)

For instance, the use of 'will' in English statements like 'It will rain' does not just convey information about when the event will take place (tense), but also the speaker's level of certainty that it will take place (modality/mood). Some Mandarin speakers might criticise Chen's study by saying that Mandarin too can convey future meaning on the verb, using the auxiliary verb 会 huì, which marks both futurity and certainty (much like English 'will') and is necessarily used when one wishes to convey both futurity and certainty.

In general, describing the TAM system of any language is very tricky. Two analyses of the same language by two different linguists may look very different, depending on such factors as the linguist's native language(s); the linguist's own theoretical orientation; the methodology used to collect the data; and the linguistic intuitions of the language consultant providing the data. At the cross-linguistic level, it is also very difficult to compare the TAM systems of different languages - it is not as simple as translating a sentence from one language to another and looking for a one-to-one correspondence. For instance, consider:

(3) Je suis à Lyon. 'I am in Lyon.' (I'm in Lyon now!)
(4) Je suis à Lyon pour 7 jours. 'I am in Lyon for 7 days.' (I intend to stay in Lyon for 7 seven days.)
(5) Je suis à Lyon depuis 7 jours. 'I have been in Lyon for 7 days.'

In French, all three sentences use the same present tense form suis (from the verb être 'to be'), while in English we see the present tense form am (from the verb to be) in only (3) and (4), not (5). Can we then say that the 'present tense' in French is the same as the 'present tense' in English?


As I mentioned in my last post, Chen's study is informed by more recent work on the relationship language and thought. However, there is one fundamental flaw in the application of this hypothesis to the data - namely, it starts to look at tendencies within a language rather than obligatoriness. The nature of the data collected in his study is also problematic, as is the reliance on what is a rather subjective way to code languages for tense. Admittedly, this lack of agreement when describing a language's TAM system and when comparing the TAM systems of different languages is something for linguists to work out, assuming consensus can ever be reached.

Given all that I've written, I actually do wonder what correlations Chen has found, since he seems to be convinced of many of the correlations he's found. I'd actually like to see more work on the potential impacts of one's language on behaviour, though perhaps not at the scale Chen has worked at, which is something I might write about soon. I might also spend one more post discussing some of the issues I have with the survey / census data Chen has used for his study.


[ADDENDUM (12/03/2013): If you've come here looking to see if a particular language is 'futureless' or not, there is no easy answer to this. Languages are not either 'futureless' or 'futured', and where you draw this subjective line depends on the criteria you choose. As in Chen's study, such criteria may also lead you to allow or ignore particular types of sentences from the language you are considering. Finally, you also need to consider the analysis of the language you are using, since grammatical analyses of languages can and do differ from scholar to scholar.]

Language and savings correlation?

There's been quite a bit of internet buzz this past week about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. You can see his TEDx talk here: Could language affect your way to save money? as well as an attention-grabbing and rather misleading BBC article about his work: Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire. Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak may affect your savings behaviour, depending on how your language grammatically encodes statements about the future.

(If you're also interested, Chen's working paper can be downloaded here. The Language Log blog actually discussed his work a year ago in two posts: Keith Chen, Whorfian economist, where Geoff Pullum critically examines the linguistics behind the proposal; and Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis, where Mark Liberman questions the interpretation of the statistics. Chen was also invited to write a response to those raised concerns, which can be read here: Whorfian economics.)

First of all, I should state that even though I still have a lot of doubts regarding this study, I absolutely love the cross-disciplinary nature of the work. This is the sort of work that needs to be actively encouraged. It doesn't matter if Chen himself is not a linguist - inter-disciplinary work will often lead one into territory that one is unfamiliar with, and it doesn't help if the other side is aggressively marking their territory. He has clearly done a lot of research, and is not basing his claims simply on personal observations and anecdotes. All the media attention should also not detract from the fact that Chen has put in a lot of thought and effort into the study. And given that much of academia these days is being starved of funding, a little media attention really shouldn't hurt.

With regards to this study, there are three broad areas that I think would be fruitful topics of discussion: (1) the link between language and thought; (2) the idea of 'futureless' languages; (3) the data that was used in this study and the problem of a 'monolingual' mindset in linguistics. In this post, I'd just like to start off with the first topic.

Language and thought

A very common assumption that I've come across is that if Language X has a word for a particular concept (usually one's own language), but Language Y doesn't have a word for it, then that concept must not exist in Language Y. One argument against this is that it doesn't matter if there's no single word translation if a full sentence can capture the same meaning. Others may argue that it's just not the translation in Language Y just doesn't have the exact same meaning as in Language X. Some people may then put this difference down not to language, but to culture. This may then lead them to try and tease language from culture, while others argue that it can't be done. What we have then, is a hypothesis that cannot be proven or falsified either way.

Thankfully, this assumption is not the premise for Chen's research. Despite the unfortunate wording on the TEDx talk page, he is not making the point that just because a language doesn't have future tense marking, its speakers don't have a concept of the future. Rather, he is tapping into a growing body of work that suggests that the language you speak subtly influences what you pay attention to in the world. Much of this work is built around Roman Jakobson's observation that “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”, a quote that Chen cites in his research.

The point here is not about whether Language X has a word or a tense that Language Y has, but whether Language X obliges speakers of that language to talk about something in a way that Language Y does not. One widely cited example is that of Guugu Yimithirr, a language spoken in Australia, whose speakers are forced to use cardinal points to describe the location of a person or thing in relation to another one, given the lack of what we would consider to be terms like 'left' and 'right' in English, i.e. speakers have to say something like 'He is sitting to my north'. It has been found that speakers of this language are much more aware of their cardinal orientation than speakers of languages that aren't forced to habitually make reference to cardinal points. (This is grossly simplified, but you can read more about this here and in Levinson's 1997 paper). The point here is not that English lacks the resources to say 'He is sitting to my north'. It may sound odd, but it is perfectly possible. Rather, the point is that speakers of English are not obliged to habitually note their cardinal orientation, while speakers of Guugu Yimithirr are.

In his TEDx talk, Chen highlights the problem of translating 'uncle' into Mandarin Chinese, since you are forced to specify whether the person is your father's sibling or your mother's, and whether they are older or younger than your father or mother. In English, you could certainly use the phrase 'maternal uncle who is older than my mother' but you are not forced to. Therefore, one might argue that a speaker of Mandarin has to be constantly aware of such relationships much more than an English speaker.

Here, Chen's example is not the best. I come from a Chinese family myself, and many of these relationships and the terms to address various extended family members were 'calculated' by my parents when I was pretty young. From then on, the name got associated with that person, and I'm not actually forced to habitually make these calculations anymore. A better example would have looked at information that a language compels its speakers to specify, suggesting that they have to habitually pay attention to such information, e.g. how Russian obligatorily forces speakers to say whether they walked or travelled by vehicle; or how Sherpa obligatorily forces speakers to say whether an action was done on purpose or not.

In general, I would say that Chen's work is informed by current linguistic research into the relationship between language and thought. This can be seen in his working paper:

[...] English forces its speakers to habitually divide time between the present and future in a way that Mandarin (which has no tenses) does not. Of course, this does not mean that Mandarin speakers are unable (or even less able) to understand the difference between the present and future, only that they are not required to attend to it every time they speak. This difference, in the obligatory marking of future events is a central characteristic of the weak vs strong FTR classification (Thieroff 2000), and is the difference between languages I exploit in my study of savings behaviors.

Bear in mind that within linguistics, the debate about the relationship between language and thought is by no means over. The Economist website held an online debate in December 2010 on just this topic. Suffice it to say, there is even less consensus on the effects language might have on behaviour, or the mechanism by which this might occur. Even if Chen's findings are robust enough to show a strong correlation between language and saving behaviour, there is a lot that needs to be done to show that it is a causal relationship, i.e. it is the language causing a change to saving behaviour.

However, my main concern with Chen's work is the actual application of this to tense systems of the world's languages. This will be the subject of my next post.

[Guy Deustcher's article in the New York Times (26/08/10): Does Your Language Shape How You Think? provides great coverage of the research in linguistics to a non-specialist reader.]

Nagaland village focus: Khuzama

As I prepare to leave India again (this time to spend Christmas at home with the family for the first time in years), I thought I'd share some photos from a visit to another friend's village in Nagaland. Like Khonoma village that we also visited, Khuzama is an Angami village. You can tell it's an Angami by the suffix -ma (corresponding to Sumi village names that end in -mi). However, most Angami speakers seem to replace the -ma with -ra / -rie when they refer to the villages in speech.

While Khonoma is a Western Angami village, Khuzama is one of the Southern Angami villages situated on the highway between Kohima and Imphal in Manipur. It's also the last Angami village before you reach the state border with Manipur and the start of Mao territory. The Maos (not to be confused with Maoists) are another related tribe. Linguistically, Southern Angami dialects are so different from Tenyidie (standard Angami based on Northen Angami) that they might constitute a different language altogether. My friend from Khuzama says he finds it easier to understand Chokri (one of the main languages of the group previously classified as 'Eastern Angami' but now known as Chakhesang).

The current Khuzama village gate

The weekend my friend from Australia was around, our Angami friends who usually live in Kohima had a church function to attend in Khuzama. I thought it'd be nice to go for a walk around the terraces and they were happy for us to take us to the village. They got one of the boys in the village to take us around, and also to explain to people why a couple of strangers were walking around their village.

Our 'guide' for the afternoon brought us to our friend's plot of land. Unlike with jhum cultivation, which involves shifting to a new field site every 2 years and the re-allocation of new plots to people to cultivate (typically by the village chief), terraces are 'owned' by the same people every year. They are also passed down from generation to generation, but only to sons I believe.

From the village, we could also see the neighbouring village of Viswema. I'm told it's the largest of the Southern Angami villages. If you've been on the highway from Kohima to Imphal, you would have probably noticed that most of the roofs on the houses have been painted red, making it almost look like some Italian village on a hilltop.

We walked down all the way to the little river / stream. It would've been nice to have a picnic on the rocks in the middle of the stream, but we hadn't organised ourselves that well.

We had a really pleasant afternoon walking around the terraced fields down to the stream. It didn't take us long to get down, but the climb back up was quite strenuous, and we weren't carrying baskets of grain or anything back up to the village with us! We were told that when there's a lot of work to be done in the fields, some villagers do sleep in the field huts that you can see dotting the hillside.


I should add that the Angamis and Chakhesangs (formerly 'Eastern Angamis', as mentioned above) are cited as the only two tribes in Nagaland to have started practising terracing before the arrival of the British. (They do still practise some jhum cultivation to grow other crops.) I've been asking around about the origins of terracing in these tribes, as it strikes me as imported technology, but no one I've asked has been able to give a satisfactory reply. I would be quite interested to find out more about local stories / folktales surrounding its origins in these communities.

Alright, this will probably be my last post in India for a while. I still have a backlog of material to upload, and I'll try to do that when I'm back in Singapore or Australia. In the meantime, Happy Holidays everyone!

Khonoma village (Take two)

Two years ago I visited Khonoma village, which is about 2 hours from Kohima (depending on road conditions). Unfortunately, the day I visited was terribly foggy and it was hard to see anything (see here). This time, I visited again shortly after the Hornbill Festival. Thankfully the weather was much better, since I also came with a friend from Australia who may not have another chance to come back.

Now, there are some friends who don't feel that Khonoma needs any special mention or recommendation. Even among my Angami friends, people from Khonoma are often perceived as being particularly proud, arrogant even. The village itself is famed for its defiance of the British which culminated in the Battle of Khonoma in 1879 that resulted in the deaths of a number of British soldiers.

The villagers even manufactured their own guns, based on models acquired in the plains of Assam. This particular gun required two people to hold it up, while a third person loaded it.

Another reason for the perceived 'smugness' might be because the village has also produced a number of intellectuals. I'm told the reason for this is that during the British siege, the villagers smuggled out a number of kids to Dimapur where they eventually received their education (and hence the overall better standard of education in the village compared to others in Nagaland). I'm not quite sure how true this is, but in the absence of other explanations, I'm willing to accept it. The village also produced a number of founding members of the Naga independence movement, including Phizo himself.

In any case, Khonoma is a pleasant place to visit if you're in Kohima for the Hornbill Fesitval (although the Southern Angami villages past the Kisama Heritage Village are also quite picturesque - but that's for another post). It prides itself on being a 'green village', and there are rubbish bins all over the village which to my eye are actually used. To my surprise, I learnt that the village still has a functioning morung, a kind of dormitory where young men were sent to learn about traditional ways and to form bonds with members of their peer group. (It was even more of a surprise for me because Hutton in his book The Angami Nagas mentions that the morung wasn't very significant to the Angamis). Some villages also had a female equivalent, although I was told there was none in Khonoma at the present time.

The streets are generally well maintained, with competitions between the various peer groups, known as peli in Tenyidie (the standard Angami dialect used in church and schools). Here, one can see the work of one peli working on a section of road, so that they don't get outdone by other peli who are in charge of other sections of the same road.

My Angami friends in Kohima organised the visit for us. We had a local guide named Michael, who used to be the president of the students' union here (I believe), and who was very knowledgeable about the village's history.

I don't normally do such recommendations, but I was quite impressed by his role in organising the members of the village to maintain its cleanliness and preserve the local wildlife. I would say that many villages in Nagaland could benefit from learning from Khonoma's system of organisation, but I don't want to inflate the villagers' egos any further!

If you are interested in visiting Khonoma village, you can contact Mr Michael Saphi (Khonoma Tours & Treks) at +91 98 5655 9394.

Hornbill Festival 2012

So the Hornbill Festival at Kisama has come and gone. This year I brought a friend from Australia along to enjoy the festivities. After my experiences at the festival last year and the year before, I didn't really want to spend all week in Kisama, since many of the shows start to feel repetitive after a few days. I thought it'd be best if we arrive on the 4th day for the last few days, then stay back a few more days to enjoy some of the sights around Kohima when most of the other tourists would have moved on. I think it was a good decision (as I sit here typing this in our now empty guest house).

My friend quite enjoyed the whole event, which his colleague in Melbourne had described last year as 'better than National Geographic', which makes me laugh a little. Sadly, in this post I won't be waxing lyrical about the festival, but would like to point out a few things that made me quite unhappy and in the process, perhaps raise a few questions about the future of the festival.

Looking at the photo below, you might notice the big black stage that was set up right next to the performance area, taking up a large chunk of what was previously audience space. This stage was used for the opening and closing ceremonies of the festival, on the 1st and 7th of December respectively. In between those two days, it seems that the stage was not used at all.

As far as I could see, additional seating had not been provided (apart from some reserved seats for soldiers and their families), even though a third of the previous years' seating was now taken up by a stage that was largely non-functional for the majority of the festival. And when it was used, the sight lines were so bad because of the large speakers, that many people sitting in the audience area (myself included) weren't able to see the actual performance onstage and had to resort to watching a small screen at the back of the stage. It seems the only people with a proper view of the stage were the people in the VIP area.

This non-consideration of general audience members was apparent during all the cultural performances too. While some performances were geared to the audience, most of them, especially the song items were not oriented to the general seating area, but to the VIP booth.

The Zeliang cultural troupe performing a song for the VIPs

If I now asked: "Who is the festival really for?", the answer would be rather straightforward. Not Nagas from all over the state. Not tourists, domestic and foreign. It's the small group of people that the organisers have deemed 'very important'.

I'm sorry, but people didn't come all this way to see performers' behinds while they perform. (Okay, maybe some people did, but only to take photos of them in costume.)

I was particularly disappointed at the closing ceremony - it didn't help that I could barely see the stage. At one point, the performers from the various cultural troupes had to get up and form the usual lines to welcome the Chief Guest who, as custom dictates, arrived late. In the middle of their chanting and singing, the 'pre-entertainment' started on the opposite side of the performance area, where singers on the big black stage started their renditions of ABBA and Bruce Springstein, while Bebop dancers popped and locked to Michael Jackson and the Black-eyed Peas. Given the much louder competition from the stage, many of the cultural troupes eventually stopped their own singing to watch the concert, as it was unclear when Neiphiu Rio was actually going to turn up.

What could have been 'cultural fusion' had turned into 'cultural confusion', with modern pop music drowning out the traditional (or rather, the acceptable version of 'traditional').

Once the Chief Guest arrived, the audience was treated to a concert, but it eventually took two hours for the large bonfire to be lit. During the concert, audience members were encouraged to come and dance, and many did, even though my friends and I thought it would have been much better to finish the formalities, like lighting the fire before asking people to jump in and let loose. I felt quite sorry for many of the cultural troupes, especially villagers from the eastern parts of Nagaland who looked cold as they shivered through the concert. A large bonfire while the concert was going on would have much more comfortable.


The question here I posed was: "Who is the concert for?" Maybe it was to expose the villagers, especially from the eastern regions to modern culture? It didn't look like many of them enjoyed it though. Maybe it was for the tourists, to show people them that 'Nagas are modern'. But after 2 hours of listening to Adele, Celine Dion, Psy and ABBA, my friends and I were saying, "Yes, we get it: Nagas are modern. Just light the damn fire already!"

Perhaps it was most obvious, when in the middle of the show, there was a request made to the Chief Minister to let the youth 'party a little bit more'. What could have been interpreted previously as an act of education, I now simply viewed as an act of self-indulgence, at the expense of all other audience members. Of course, even before the fire was lit, many younger audience members had already left, presumably to the Hornbill Rock Festival at the IG Stadium on the other side of Kohima.

In a number of ways, I think this year's festival truly reflected Nagaland in its current state. You could see the over-privileging of a small elite, the over-indulgence of youth consumerist culture, and the general struggle for a sense of cultural identity in today's world.

I don't think there's an easy way to address any of these issues. However, before I encourage other friends to come attend this festival (which itself was a creation of the government), I think the organisers need to sit down and reflect on who the festival is really for: Nagas (and which ones in particular), tourists (domestic or foreign) or just the VIPs?