Showing posts with label sherpa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sherpa. Show all posts

Saturday, December 4, 2010

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'.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Mani Rimdu

The festival of Mani Rimdu at Tengboche, sometimes referred to that 'dancing monk' festival, takes place in the 9th Tibetan month, usually sometime in late October. The main festivities last three days - I believe right after the full moon, though preparations start much earlier. The 16th day is the most important day when the monks from the monastery perform a number of masked dances in the courtyard of the monastery.

The name 'Mani Rimbu' comes from the 'Mani', which forms part of the Avalokiteshvara (or Chenrezig in Tibetan) chant 'Om mani padme hum'. 'Rimdu' is from 'rildu', referring to the small red pills that are blessed and distributed at the main empowerment ceremony. (Note: I'm not sure how the alveolar lateral becomes a bilabial nasal here, not an alveolar nasal 'n', but it could just be one more step in the process of sound dissimilation.)

The Tengboche Monastery
Tengboche Monastery

It just so happened that the main festival day was taking place right in the middle of my short visit to Khumbu, so I decided to do the three hour hike from Khumjung to Tengboche (and back) to catch a glimpse of some of the festivities. It was a fun day, though I don't know if I would've liked to have spent the whole day and a night at the festival by myself (Sara had gone off trekking to the stunningly gorgeous area around Gokyo). In any case, I took her advice and got the little sheet of paper at the visitor centre which explained each dance.

While I arrived around 9.30am, the first dance I got to see was about an hour later (and after a piece of applie pie and pot of milk tea). The Ging-cham is performed by four dancers - two females with drums and two males with cymbals who act as the heralds of Dorje Trollo, the 'wrathful appearance' of the Rinpoche who established Buddhism in Tibet (I'm not quite sure why he would be wrathful), and a kind of patron of the monastery.

Ging-cham
Mani Rimdu - Ging-cham dance

Dorje Trollo appears
Mani Rimdu - Dorje Trollo

Nga-cham was my favourite dance, featuring a pair of 'skeleton' dancers with rather monkey-like movements.

Mani Rimdu - Nga-cham dance

At one point, the two skeletons take the ends of a rope, in the middle of which is tied a dough figure which represents evil. Two dancers in big black hats destroy this dough figure.

Mani Rimdu - Nga-cham dance

Mani Rimdu - Nga-cham dance

As a comic interlude, a monk appears as an old man, named 'Mi Tsering', who grabs an audience member, usually a poor unsuspecting tourist and drags them around the courtyard making them do silly things from exchanging hats to mixing flour and water throwing the mixture at people in the crowd. I'd heard the girl who got dragged along from the ride say earlier that she had to get to Machhermo - about 5 hours away - by nightfall. The poor thing...

Mani Rimdu - Mi Tsering

Between dances, monks would come around and offer biscuits and milk tea. I'm not a big fan of hot drinks in small plastic cups, though it stop me from having my 6th cup of the morning.

Mani Rimdu biscuits

There were a number of other dances, but I figured I needed to leave by early enough to get back to Khumjung by nightfall. Before I left, I was glad I managed to spot a monk with his digital camera filming some of the dancing - after all, why should the tourists get all the fun?

Mani Rimdu

Monday, November 1, 2010

Volitionality and passing gas

In Sherpa, like in other Tibetic languages, a distinction is made between volitional and non-volitional verbs, meaning that when you describe an action in Sherpa you usually need to specify if it is either 'on purpose', or accidental. In English this distinction is sometimes made lexically with verbs of perception, as in the difference between 'seeing' and 'looking' (or 'watching') as well as 'hearing' and 'listening'. However, in Tibetic languages, this distinction extends to most other verbs as well.

While there are some interesting pairs, my favourite one so far from the Sherpa-English dictionary is:

སླེན་ཤོར་ pen shor (v.inv) = to fart (involuntarily)
སྤེན་གཏོང་ pen tong (v.vol) = to fart

How volitionally can one fart?

Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Sherpa Evidentials

For the past week I've been here in the stunningly beautiful Khumbu (the region just south of Mount Everest), visting my friend Sara who's been doing her PhD research in the village of Khumjung (famous for its Hilary School and yeti scalp). I spent five nights in Khumjung and am now back in Namche Bazaar for another four, before heading back down to Lukla with Sara on Friday. Sara's went off to the Gokyo Valley on Saturday, while I stayed on so I could go to Tengboche on Sunday for the second last day of the Mani Rimbu festival where the monks wear masks and perform dances all day (but more on this later).

One of the other reasons I'm up here is to help a professor back in Melbourne with some Sherpa data. The first task is to collect (and transcribe -ugh) a story about a Jackal and Crow that she'd first heard years ago when she was writing her thesis on Sherpa. I've collected 6 stories so far, and barely transcribed one, with the help of one of the girls at the guest house I stayed at in Khumjung. Given my limited Nepali and even more limited Sherpa, the work is pretty slow-going and I will probably have to find some Sherpa speakers in Kathmandu when I get back to do at least one more transcription.

The second task is to look at evidentials in Sherpa. Like Tibetan, which it is closely related to, Sherpa requires the speaker to state how one knows a certain fact. For instance, in saying 'He is Sherpa', there are potentially three forms of the verb 'is' that can be used: one when it is a personal knowledge that he is Sherpa, one when it is a well known fact that he is Sherpa, and one when you are inferring he is Sherpa. Note that in English, it is just as possible to make these three distinctions by adding the phrases, "I know...", "it's  well-known fact that...", and "I think..." The difference is that in Sherpa you have to state how you know that fact.

These are three distinctions that are supposed to exist in Sherpa, as I have read in the small grammar section of the Sherpa-English dictionary. I don't dispute these distinctions, but anyone who has had to check these distinctions with native speakers of Tibetic languages can tell you what an absolute PAIN it is. It's never as simple as asking someone, "How do you say, 'He is Sherpa' in Sherpa?" Speakers invariably use the same evidential form in such translations - yin - but when I offer yinza and yinno' as alternatives, they tell me that both are acceptable too. Of course, few people can tell me when each one is used, and it would take hours of ploughing through recorded conversations or texts to actually work out when each form occurs (unless you happen to be a linguistically aware native speaker).

Then there's the linguistic obsession with paradigms. Anyone who's had to learn verb conjugations in an Indo-European language will have experienced this, systematically going  through verb forms like 'I am', 'You (singular) are', 'We are' etc, along with their question forms 'Am I?', 'Are you?', 'Are we?' etc.

The reality is that it is not always possible to get a full set of these forms. It is surprisingly difficult to get the form 'You are' in the affirmative, simply because it's rare to go up to someone and tell them who or what they are. It's far more common to have that as a question - 'Are you ...'. Conversely, it's nearly impossible to get the interrogative forms 'Am I?' and 'Are we?'. Speakers will tell me, 'No, no, that's not a question' and simply reject the fact that 'Am I?' or 'Are we?' can exist as questions. I suppose their reasoning is that you don't need to ask those questions to someone else when you're asking about something you're supposed to know about yourself.

Am I going slightly crazy? Yes, I suppose I am. Might go for a short trek tomorrow out of Namche to clear my head. It's one of the advantages of doing fieldwork in this part of the world. Photos will follow as soon as I get back to Kathmandu.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Cursing in Sherpa

Going through the recently published Sherpa-English dictionary looking for volitional / non-volitional verb sets before next week's trip to Khumbu / Everest region, I found this nice little curse in Sherpa:


རྨིག་དུང་རྐྱའུ།
(mīkdung gyau)

The translation: 'May you be buried in a hole!'

I suppose not all of us can get a decent sky burial.