Cucumber baby

So I'm spending a few days in Kohima, the state capital of Nagaland. I'm in town mainly for the Hornbill Festival, but also to meet with one of the linguistics professors at Nagaland University, as well as to sort out some other 'administrative' things like an extenstion to my current permit *fingers crossed* and Tata mobile internet for when I'm in Dimapur and Assam (I'm not sure if the Tata Photon Plus will work in Zunheboto, *fingers crossed*).

I'm staying with B., who's organised both my permits to enter Nagaland, and her husband. They live next to the original Kohima village site known as Tsütuonuomia Khel or more commonly, T-Khel. The term khel refers to a village sub-division - nowadays it almost corresponds to the local term 'colony' (or 'suburb' to most Anglophones).



In Angami tradition, villages (and khels) were generally named after their founders. Hence the name Tsütuonuomia, the founder of this khel, whose name translates as 'cucumber baby'.

Now the story goes that there was once a cowherd who would take her cattle down to where the road between Kohima and Dimapur now runs. She got pregnant out of wedlock, which I assume was the guy's fault, but women always get the blame. Ashamed, she covered up the pregnancy until the time came to give birth. She then ran away to the fields to have the child in secret (most certainly without a midwife). On her way back and still ashamed, she covered the child in a blanket. When people asked what she was carrying, she told them it was cucumber.

And so the child was named 'cucumber baby' and grew up to found this khel.

Visit to Satoi (II)

When we arrived in Satoi, it became clear that our little 'sightseeing' trip would involve a little more than sightseeing. It was the 50th anniversary of the local pastor's appointment in the village and the occasion was in away a retirement party for him. I think it was also meant to commemorate his 75th birthday. Arriving with the reverend meant more VIP treatment - this time we got chappatis and avi kighinoli (mithun innards) and more cups of milk and black tea.

We were then led into the church, where the service was held.




I was a little embarrassed because they first ushered me right to the front to sit on the couches in the front row, when even the pastor was sitting on a plastic chair. At least we managed to give our seats to the pastor and his wife, but I ended up sitting in front of other guests of honour. During the service, I also had to stand and give a little wave while Ab. introduced me to the whole congregation - being a foreigner, having an MA and having worked on Sumi is apparently enough to attract this kind of attention. At the end of the service, I was presented, along with the other VIPs, with a bag containing a book about the pastor's life.

Then there was the feast following the service. To be fair, I could've taken a little less food without offending anyone, but I counted no less than four kinds of meat: pork, chicken, beef and mithun, cooked in a whole host of ways. And a lot more fat... but at least there were fresh vegetables. I only had one serving, which was more than enough...


On our way back from Satoi, we managed to stop a few times to take photos of the valley. You can see Zunheboto town on the ridge just off to the right.


We also stopped again in Ghokhüvi to look at some of the Baptist conference preparations. I really liked the traditional wind chimes that adorned the entrance to the main venue.



A view of Ghokhüvi from the bottom of the village


Leaving the village, we had to drive again down to the base of the valley and up again. This time we had a bit more time, so we stopped for photos at the bridge right near the confluence of the Tizü and Tsütha Rivers. It's a very pretty valley.



The Tsütha River just before it joins the Tizü




I had a great day, despite the initial embarrassment and over-eating. Looking forward to visiting other villages and having more feasts!

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...