Booking a hotel in India

I've had a rather mixed bag when booking hotels / guest houses in India.

My first time in Kolkata in 2009, I'd booked a room at a guest house via email but arrived to find it had been given away (I had been afraid of that, given that my flight was arriving in the evening but I'd given them my flight details). When I was in Delhi a few months ago, I contacted a hotel via email and was given the option of a 'standard' or 'deluxe' room, but did not hear from them when I told them I wanted the 'standard' room. They only replied when I wrote back saying I would 'take a look' at the deluxe room and see if I wanted it. Of course, when I arrived at the hotel, I found I only had the option of the deluxe room.

Yesterday (Friday) I was trying to book a hotel room in Guwahati for me and some visiting friends from Nagaland for Saturday and Sunday night or Sunday and Monday night, depending on when my friends were coming. I visited one hotel to ask about vacancies and they said they were fully booked for Saturday, but Sunday was fine. When I rang later to book for Sunday, there were suddenly no more vacancies (something about a wedding party booking the whole place). But when I dropped by in person this morning, there was once again a room available for Sunday.

Slightly more puzzling was this conversation I had when I rang another hotel:

Me: Do you have a vacancy on Sunday night?
Guy on phone: No sir, fully booked.
Me: Are you sure you are fully booked?
Him: Yes sir.
Me: Okay, I'm actually in Guwahati already. I have some friends coming on either Saturday or Sunday and need a room for two nights.
Him: We have vacancy for tomorrow (Saturday). I think it is better if you come tomorrow.
Me: Yes, but I need the room for two nights.
Him: Okay sir, you can have the room for two nights.

I considered it wise not to point out the obvious discrepancy between his initial response and his latest one. Later I called to push the reservation back one night, with no problems.

It's not the first time I've been first told by a hotel on the phone that they are fully booked, before later finding out - either by going in person, or in the same phone conversation - that a room is in fact available. Why on earth do hotels here feel the need to do this? It's almost as if they don't want full occupancy.

A more prosodic take on Indian English

Today I was at one of Guwahati's few cafes asking the waitress for direction to another place that I suspected wasn't too far away. Now I can ask in Assamese for basic directions now, but being at a cafe meant I could ask in English. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Is it far? Can I walk there?
Her: No, you have to take a bus.
Me: How long will it take to walk there? Half an hour?
Her: It won't take that long.

Now the thing is, when I heard her say 'it won't take that long', I instantly did a double-take and asked if she meant that it would take more than half an hour or less than half an hour to get there on foot. It sounds absurd to me in hindsight because the only possible reading for 'it won't take that long' should be 'it will take less time than that'.

However, for some reason, I interpreted what she had said as 'it won't take exactly half an hour to get there'. Till now, I can't figure out why I thought that and felt the need to clarify. I suspect the confusion was due to a combination of factors. For one thing, I'm always wary of familiar expressions that have slightly different interpretations in Indian English (see my previous post). It also didn't help that in terms of intonation, the word 'that' didn't receive any prominence compared to the word 'long' - if I'd heard 'it won't take that long' with emphasis / nuclear accent on 'that', I'm sure I wouldn't have needed clarification.

Then again, I don't think her speaking in monotone alone was sufficient to cause the confusion (even though it didn't help). Perhaps the reason was more to do with what she'd previously said - if it takes me less than half an hour to walk somewhere (and there's a footpath next to the road and it's not too hot or too cold), why on earth would I want to catch an overcrowded bus?

Making pithas for Magh Bihu

I arrived in Guwahati just in time for the harvest festival মাঘ বিহু Magh Bihu, also known as ভোগালী বিহু Bhogali Bihu - I'm told Bhogali is derived from the Assamese word for 'feast' since the festival is associated with a time of plenty. It also marks the first day of the 10th Assamese month মাঘ Magh.

One of my Assamese tutors (I have two who take turns being my language consultants) was nice enough to take me to a small Bihu fair that was taking place in town. One of the most important activities at the fair was the making of পিঠা pitha, which are typically little rice cakes that come in a number of forms. The process begins with the pounding of rice, which some ladies were doing using the foot-operated mill called a ঢেকী dheki (which I believe is used in Bangladesh too).



Watching the woman on the far right stick her hand in and out of the mortar made me feel like time itself was moving at double speed.


The rice flour is used to make a batter that is cooked on a small pan.


The cooked batter is then rolled up and various fillings are added.


The one everyone was lining up for (or as close to a line as one gets in India) were তিল পিঠা til pitha 'sesame pithas' filled with black sesame, as well as the ones filled with grated coconut (narikol pitha?). We had to wait 45 minutes (!) just to get ten of the sesame ones, and it was going to be another half hour for the coconut ones, so we just left with the sesame ones.

But frankly, having tried other pithas given to me by people, including my other Assamese tutor who just brought some back from her hometown of Dibrugarh in Upper Assam, those pithas from the fair really weren't worth the wait!

Vowels: Does /j/ + /a/ = /æ/ ?

This is something that has been bugging me a little bit since I was in Nepal back in October last year. It concerns the orthographic representation of the English vowel /æ/ in words like taxi /tæksi/ when they are borrowed into Nepali.

The word for taxi in Nepali is ट्याक्सि, which transliterated gives Tyaaksi, where T represents a voiceless unaspirated retroflex stop (the tip of the tongue is slightly further back than when you produce a normal alveolar 't' sound in English). The appearance of the retroflex is not surprising here as English alveolar stops are usually borrowed into Indic languages like Nepali and Hindi as retroflex stops. (Assamese is the exception here as it has lost its retroflex stop series.)

The Nepali spelling suggests that the word is pronounced /ʈjaksi/ (/j/ represents the sound 'y'). My friend Sara insisted that Nepali speakers would palatalise (produce a particular speech sound while simultaneously raising the body of the tongue towards the roof of the mouth) the first consonant when saying the word and her theory was that they were trying to follow the American pronunciation of the word 'taxi'. (Correct me if I got this wrong Sara.)

I wasn't convinced with that explanation. For one thing, I would often hear speakers say something closer to /ʈɛksi/, without palatalising the first consonant and with the vowel /ɛ/, which is much more similar to /æ/. I also didn't see why Nepali would borrow English /t/ as a palatalised retroflex stop /ʈj/ since English /t/ isn't palatalised in this context. Also, I thought it counterintuitive that speakers would follow an American English pronunciation to guide their spelling, given the influence of British English across the Indian sub-continent.

Instead, my theory was that the combination of the letters 'y' and 'a' (या) represent the vowel /æ/ (or a close approximation like /ɛ/) and are not pronounced like /ja/. Unfortunately, other things came up (like 2 months in Nagaland), and I wasn't able to get more evidence to support my hypothesis.

Then today on the bus back to the Guwahati University Guest House, I found myself staring at the sign for the Volkswagen showroom while we were stuck in traffic. While I'm not as familiar with the Assamese script, the main thing I noticed was that the syllable corresponding to 'wa' in Volkswagen was written as ওয়া, which would be transliterated as 'oya'. Now, I'm assuming that the transliteration of Volkswagen in the Assamese script is based on the English pronunciation of the word and not the German one - the presence of 'o' in 'oya' suggests that it is trying to approximate /w/, not /v/. If this is true, then it provides evidence from another Indic language that a combination of the letters 'y' and 'a' are used to represent the English /æ/, as in 'wagon' /wægən/, or a close approximation of that sound.

I have to take a photo of that Volkswagen sign next time I pass by. Once I do and have evidence that Assamese does in fact use 'ya' to represent /æ/, I might try and confirm that Nepali uses the same strategy to represent this vowel.

(Note: standard Hindi avoids this problem altogether because it has the vowel /ɛ/ in its phoneme inventory, which is close to /æ/. It is often transliterated as 'ai' even though it is not a diphthong, e.g. in टैक्सी Taiksii 'taxi'. Also, the vowel in Bollywood actress Katrina Kaif's last name is not pronounced as a diphthong in standard Hindi.)

Popular Linguistics

Hooray, there's a new online magazine Popular Linguistics that will hopefully bring some (more) linguistics to the general public:

http://popularlinguisticsonline.org/home/

Not that I'm expecting people to stop asking questions like:

'So what is it that you study?' or
'Oh, how many languages do you speak? or'
'My father does logistics too!'

(Okay, so the last one wasn't a question, but someone did say that to me once.)

Adivasi or 'tribal'?

The Lonely Planet guide to Northeast India (2nd edition, 2009) features a pathetic 50 pages (!) on the seven main Northeast States of Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh. The remaining 330 pages are devoted to Kolkata, West Bengal, Sikkim and Orissa, with a section on Bangladesh and Nepal too. But the book really is disappointing if you're looking for information on travel in what I think of what I think of 'Northeast India'.

But that's not the only reason I'm disappointed with the book. Throughout the book, the editors have decided to use the term Adivasi to mean 'tribal person' (as defined in their glossary). Now, in other parts of India, the term Adivasi is used to refer to all tribal people, but in the Northeast (which the guide claims to be about), the term is used exclusively to refer to the descendants of people who were brought to Assam by the British to work in the tea plantations. They are treated as a separate 'tea-tribe' ethnic group, as demonstrated by this 'traditional Adivashi house' (like in Nepali, sh and s have merged into one sound) at the Kohora ethnic village.

If you're looking for an umbrella term for the other ethnic groups of the region, the term tribal is used more commonly, even if it does sound terribly political incorrect and colonial to Western ears. There is still sadly the connotation of people who are backward and primitive and unfortunately, it's a view that doesn't look set to change in the near future.

Counting in Indic languages

To commemorate my 100th post on this blog (yes, it's been a hundred) and the fact that I'm learning some Assamese here in Guwahati, I thought I'd talk about learning to count in an Indic language - basically any one of the many Indo-European languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent, including Hindi, Bengali, Nepali and Assamese.

Now I'm not talking about their numeral systems, since most of us use a derivation of the Hindu or Hindu-Arabic numeral system on a daily basis, which is a decimal system that uses only 10 digits from 0 to 9. What I'm talking about are the names for the numbers in these languages.

Now non-native speakers learning to count in English from 1 to 100, technically only need to memorise the names of the numbers from 1 to 20, then every multiple of 10 till 100. That's because after 20, we simply say 20 'twenty' and 1 'one' to get 21 'twenty one'; 20 'twenty' and 2 'two' to get 22 'twenty two' and so on. However, they still need to learn what 11-19 are since we don't say 'ten one' for 11, or 'ten two' for 12. They also need to learn the names for the multiples of 10 since these are not entirely regular - we don't say 'three-ty' for 30 or 'five-ty' for 50. (Sure, you might say there's a pattern with 40 and 60-90, but it's not as regular as say, 21-29.)

What non-native speakers find learning to count in Indic languages is that while there are some patterns like the kind you find from 60 'sixty' to 90 'ninety' in English, most of the time it seems like you just have to memorise the name of every single number from 1 to 100.

For instance, if we look at 5, 15, 25, 35 ... 85, 95 in Hindi:

5 पाँच paaNch (N indicates nasalisation on the preceding vowel)
15 पन्द्रह pandrah
25 पच्चीस pachchiis          (20 is बीस biis)
35 पैंतीस paiNtiis              (30 is तीस tiis)
45 पैंतालीस paiNtaaliis      (40 is चालीस chaaliis)
55 पचपन pachapan          (50 is पचास pachaas)
65 पैंसठ paiNsaTh             (60 is साठ saaTh)
75 पचहत्तर pachahattara     (70 is सत्तर sattara)
85 पचासी pachaasii            (80 is अस्सी assii)
95 पंचानबे paNchaanabe     (90 is नब्बे nabbe)

You can sort of see a pattern, but it's not quite possible to analyse each form morphologically and tease out the part that means 'five units'. Goodness also knows when to decide when to nasalise the vowel or not. Also, look at the words for 25 (pachchiis) and 50 (pachaas) - I always get their Nepali counterparts mixed up.

Assamese isn't much different. Here're the numbers from 1-12 in Assamese - which is as far as I'll go for now since it'll allow me to tell the time. I'll probably get up to 31 so I can give dates, and also learn a few more multiples of 10.

1 এক ek
2 দুই dui
3 তিনি tini
4 চাৰি sari
5 পাঁচ pans [pãs]
6 ছয় sôy [sɔj]
7 সাত xaat
8 আঠ aath
9 ন nô [nɔ]
10 দহ dôh
11 এঘাৰ egharô
12 বাৰ barô

When I come up with a good way to memorise the numbers from 0 to 100 in such languages I'll let you know. In the meantime, thank goodness people here in Guwahati also use English numbers.