Happy Deepavali / Diwali

To all Hindus, Happy Deepavali / இனிய தீபாவளி நல்வாழ்த்துக்கள் (iniya deepavali nalvazhthukkal). It's a public holiday here in Singapore. Unlike last year when I was really getting into the spirit of the Nepali counterpart Tihar (see here), this year there won't be any such cultural immersion for me. However, I did drop by Little India here in Singapore yesterday looking for sweets, which was a big mistake, given the last minute rush for sweets and other items for pooja / puja.

The majority of Singaporean Indians are Tamil, and the Tamil language is one of the official languages of Singapore, though sadly, it's usually the forgotten child out of the four - the only Tamil I ever paid attention to while growing up in Singapore was vannakkam, which I'd often hear at the end of the Tamil news. Also, there was never any motivation for me to learn Tamil, given that we spoke English at home, I had to learn Mandarin in school and Malay would've been my next choice since my parents speak Malay.

In any case, it's not surprising that you find signs like this one in Tamil (which reads iniya deepavali nalvazhthukkal):

But nowadays, it's also not uncommon to see signs in Hindi as well, like this one which reads: शुभ दिवाली (shubh diwālī).

A note about the etymology of the Hindi diwālī (the use of the macron indicates a long vowel): many websites I've seen say that the Hindi is a 'contraction' of the Sanskrit दीपावली dīpāvalī, a compound of दीपा dīpā 'lamp' and avalī अवली 'row'. I'm certain linguists have already worked out the exact sound changes - I just haven't spent the time doing the research, but I thought I'd have a go at explaining why it's called diwālī in Hindi, but deepavali in Tamil.

First of all, Tamil தீபாவளி deepavali  (or more precisely, tīpāvaļi since Tamil does not make a meaningful contrast between the sounds d and t) has clearly preserved the number of syllables of the original word. I'm assuming here that Tamil, probably Middle Tamil, borrowed the term from Sanskrit.

In contrast, if we assume that Hindi  दिवाली diwālī is ultimately from Sanskrit दीपावली dīpāvalī, the easiest way to explain the change would be to say that the Hindi form has undergone 'lenition', a common sound change whereby consonants 'weakened' in some way, particularly when they are surrounded by two vowels. We see such lenition in most varieties of English, e.g. the t in words like water and city are rarely pronounced like the t in words like term and tea: instead of a strongly aspirated stop [t^h], speakers often just produce a very quick tap of the tongue.

One common sound change pathway is: [p] > [b] > [v] > [ʋ] (a sound similar to [w]) > nothing. If you practise making these sounds, you'll notice that all of them involve using the lips, or at least part of the lips. Speakers of Singlish (or if you listen to the video in my previous post) will notice that the word never is often pronounced neh, with no [v] sound in the middle of the word. This is an example of such lenition.

It is therefore not difficult to see how the original [v] sound in a word like dīpāvalī could be completed deleted, while the [p] sound could lenite to [b] and then to [ʋ] (written as 'w' in transliterations of Hindi).

Simi, the Singaporean version of Siri

More Siri stuff. But since I'm in Singapore, I thought I'd blog about a clip from the mrbrown show that's been making the rounds among Singaporeans (and fans of Singlish). By the way, simi is Hokkien for 'what?' The uploader of this particular video on Youtube was also kind enough to provide a transcript of the dialogue:

I found the clip hilarious and thought I should make some comments on the language used, for the sake of my non-Singaporean linguist friends. I'm certainly no expert on Singlish (having done any personal research on the subject), but I will say that Simi's speech corresponds to a 'basilect' form of Singaporean English, which is what most people would call 'Singlish', as spoken by an ah beng 'an unsophicated Chinese boy, usually Hokkien' (as defined by TalkingCock.com).

You can find the ubiquitous sentence-final particles, including the (in)famous lah, but also other particles like ar, leh, one, what and the question particle meh. The Wikipedia article on Singlish provides a neat summary of the various particles found in Singlish, though I think they need to provide a bit more contextual evidence especially since the use of most particles is governed by context and pragmatics.

I myself should pay more attention to the use of particles in Singlish (and more standard varieties of English for that matter), as they often help me analyse particles used in languages I study. In addition to the particular context that the particle occurs in, there's usually an emotional connection with its use that's difficult to define. Speakers will often say things like a sentence / utterance 'sounds better' with a particular particle, or that the presence of a particle makes the speaker sound either more or less 'angry' or 'surprised' or 'timid' etc.

Some other grammatical features characteristic of Singlish: copular verbs (e.g. 'to be' and its forms 'is', 'are', 'am') are typically dropped before adjectives, e.g. Migrate better lah!; The CTE jam from Ang Mo Kio to Orchard Road (my intuitions tell me that jam here isn't being used as a verb). Plurality isn't usually marked on nouns with a suffix but with a quantifier like so many, e.g. got so many Bangla and PRC come and take your job and make your MRT so crowded.

You also find a few 'typically Singlish' words / expressions used, like tahan 'to endure' (from Malay) and atas 'snobbish' (lit. 'upstairs') (from Malay), as well as sibei jialat (from Hokkien) - sibei 'very' and jialat 'f*cked' (okay not quite, it literally means 'to eat strength' in Hokkien - maybe kinda like Mandarin 吃苦 'to bear hardship', lit. 'to eat bitterness').

One expression I wasn't familiar with was: why you fly my aeroplane? I had to look up the TalkingCock.com entry to learn that it means 'why are you standing me up?'. To fly aeroplane also corresponds to the Hokkien pang puay kee? but the origin of this phrase is indeterminate.

(The transcriber wasn't able to / didn't want to make out the name of the restaurant at 3:13 in the video. It's actually called the 'Ku De Ta Restaurant', located at on the roof of the new Marina Bay Sands hotel - or 'Coup d'état Restaurant', another not-so-subtle hint of subversion by the awesome mrbrown show.) 

Translation pls - Part (II)

In a similar vein to my post "Translation pls", I've discovered through a friend this blog post about Facebook and Tibetan at the Overlooking Tibet blog.

The writer considers the 'Facebook wall' to be personal space, which some people might take issue with, since it is still a public space where one broadcasts information to people on their friends list. However, the blog post alludes to wider expectations that American (and I'd say most English speakers for that matter) have that things be made available in English.

In any case, I could spend hours talking about this, but I'm off to attend a seminar at La Trobe Uni on Tibetic languages by the eminent Tibetologist Nicolas Tournadre, whose Manual of Standard Tibetan I own a copy of.

Très coincidental. Well maybe just a little bit.

What you risk when you step out your door

'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step onto the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to.'"

Yesterday I learnt that my friend Sara, who's been doing fieldwork up in the Himalayas (see this post from when I visited her last year), had an accident. From what I've heard, it's not too major, but it does require her to fly back to Kathmandu to get the problem fixed. Also, most people are actually terrified of flying in and out of Lukla airport (Youtube is filled with videos like this one) and there also seems to be at least one accident every year involving these small aircraft. I hope she's alright and that her trip to the hospital in Kathmandu won't actually make things worse...

Her accident reminded me of the inherent risk involved when you spend a long time in a place that's miles away from any proper hospital / healthcare facility. It also reminded me of the 'risk management' forms I'd recently filled in in order to get authorisation to embark on this upcoming trip. (Note: I don't officially have approval yet, but I've already got my tickets and I'll be in Singapore for just under 2 weeks.)

This was the first time I'd actually had to fill in such forms and it brought home the fact that the whole of North-east India is classified as 'Category 4 - Reconsider your need to travel' by DFAT and hence, a 'high risk' area. One of the forms had three sections to fill in:

• 'Potential risk' - what could go wrong during the travel
• 'Contributing factors / detailed risk contributions' - what could contribute to something going wrong
• 'Detailed controls' - what do you have in place to manage / reduce the identified risk

There were 4 broad categories of risk:
- Health
- Personal safety
- Civil unrest
- Terrorism

All 4 are applicable to the North-east.

Now, I usually don't consider health a major issue, since I carry my own medication and prefer to self-medicate or just rest when it's something like the flu. Mosquito-borne diseases also aren't a problem in the hills and especially during the dry season. However, I have had food poisoning twice in Nagaland, and the last time I had to endure being on a bus for 10 hours while suppressing the need to throw up, but I had people looking after me the next day. I also feel like I'd be able to get to a hospital within a day from wherever I am, though I am concerned about the state of most hospitals in India.

In terms of personal safety, I'm usually with other people when I'm in the North-east. I avoid travelling at night between cities (except for that trip on the bus with a whole group of farmers) and in towns I don't usually venture out at night all by myself. I also try to avoid riding in helicopters which have notoriously bad safety records in the region.

Civil unrest hasn't been such a problem during my last two trips to Nagaland. In fact, I've had more trouble in Assam, specifically the district of Karbi Anglong, which is frequently struck by bandhs, where local groups call for businesses to close and all local transport generally comes to a halt, unless you're on 'hospital' duty. I've only wandered out on bandh days if my friends who are familiar with the situation say it's alright to go out.

And of course, there's terrorism: North-east India is home to a myriad of organisations who are agitating for some sort of independence, be it from the state of Assam or the country of India itself. In particular, Republic Day on 26 January (same as Australia Day) is not a good time to be travelling. Earlier this year, most of the trains in the region were cancelled during the week surrounding Republic Day. A bus travelling from Guwahati to Manipur was also stopped somewhere in Karbi Anglong in the middle of the night and some passengers were shot. I was in the main city of Guwahati at the time, and I pretty much avoided hanging around the train station and marketplaces, which have been targets of bomb blasts in the past.

At the end of the day, it's not as if I'm completely alone when I travel in the North-east. I have plenty of local friends / guides and take plenty of local advice. There's always risk, but it can be minimised and managed, and I usually have an exit strategy. I generally try not to dwell on the dangers, but it's good to acknowledge them when you fill in such forms and to explicitly state how you would deal with the dangers should push come to shove. The RCLT (Research Centre for Linguistic Typology) at La Trobe Uni has a great fieldwork manual that also includes risk management (available online at the RNLD website here).

On the other hand sometimes I can't help but think: what happens if I come down with some unknown disease and need to go to a hospital but there's a strike happening and I'm forced to travel by helicopter and the helicopter crashes in the middle of the jungle and I somehow survive but run into rebel groups who then take me prisoner...

Japanese issues with Siri / Shiri

I don't actually own a smartphone, but this video's been making the rounds since the introduction of Siri with the new iP***e. I thought I'd just make a small phonetics-related comment.

Listening to the speaker, the main problem here is his production of the NURSE vowel (typically /ɜ/ or /ɜr/),  which is a notoriously problematic one for many a non-native English speaker. The Japanese speaker produces the vowel closer to the THOUGHT vowel (typically /ɔ/). I'm just surprised that with a binary option: 'work' or 'home', Siri doesn't just go with what sounds closer to the 'work' option (but I'm not one who knows anything about programming, so I'll let the techsperts deal with that.)

I'm a little late to talk about this, but for the past 2 weeks, people have been talking about how siri means 'buttocks' in Japanese. Some people like this guy at TechnoBuffalo argue that it doesn't (it means nothing he claims). The thing is, technically, the 's' /s/ sound in Japanese never comes before the 'i' /i/ vowel: think of Japanese words that have been borrowed into English, like sushi, where 's' can precede the 'u' /ɯ/ vowel, but 'sh' /ʃ/ comes before 'i''.

However, in some transliterations of Japanese, you will see the word for 'I' written as both watashi and watasi. The reason is, as stated above, that the 's' sound can't come before 'i' and must be replaced by 'sh'. Therefore by default, the si in watasi will be read as shi. So siri by default, will be pronounced like shiri, which the internet would have me believe is Japanese for 'buttocks'.

Translation fail (Melbourne Airport)

A few months ago, I spotted this at the departure lounge at Melbourne International Airport:

Somewhere in the translation from English to Chinese, gates 17, 19 and 20 just disappeared.

The system called 'reciprocity'

In honour of the new book that's being launched in the department this afternoon: Reciprocals and Semantic Typology (edited by Nick Evans, Alice Gaby, Steve Levinson and Asifa Majid), I thought I'd mention what 'reciprocals' are in linguistics and give some examples from a few common languages. (Given that I haven't seen the book yet, the examples given may be somewhat contradictory to what is given in the book.)

Those of you familiar with the concept of 'reciprocity' (or the Chicago number which the title of this post comes from) will know that it involves an 'I scratch your back, you scratch mine' or 'you be good to Mama, Mama's good to you' attitude. Similarly, 'reciprocals' in linguistics typically refer to grammatical structures that encode events where a participant is doing something to another while another participant or participants are doing the same thing to the first participant at / around the same time.

Languages do this in a number of ways. One way is to use a free standing pronoun. English uses this strategy somewhat, with each other and one another the most common ways of marking reciprocity. English grammars often treat these as 'reciprocal pronouns', but at least one editor of the book treats them differently, though they are still considered to be noun phrases. In any case, some examples in English include:

They hit each other. (By the way, linguists love using the verb 'hit' when they need a transitive verb.)
We help one another.

(Also:
We scratch each other's backs.
Mama and you are good to each other.)

Russian uses друг друга 'drug druga' (in the accusative case) or друг другу 'drug drugu' (in the dative case).

Они били друг друга.
'They hit each other.'

Мы помогаем друг другу.
'We help one another.' (lit. 'We help to one another.')

A second tactic would be to use a 'bound pronoun' or clitic. People familiar with Romance (and Slavic) languages will know the recognise the pronoun se which really can't stand by itself as a full word that can be stressed and needs to attach itself to the verb.

For instance, in French we have:

On se voit bientôt.
'We'll see each other soon.'

Ils s'aiment.
'They love each other.'

French also has the phrases l'un l'autre (for 2 participants) and les uns les autres (for more than 2 participants) which are comparable to English one another, but they're still used in conjunction with se to add emphasis to the pronoun (or so I'm led to believe by French grammar books).

Il s'aiment l'un l'autre.

'They love each other.'

A third strategy would be to use an adverb, like mutually in English. Although in English, you often still need to have the pronoun, as in:

They mutually dislike each other.

Mandarin typically uses the adverb 互相 hù xiāng to make a reciprocal construction (I usually associate its use with 'positive' actions, but I know it can be used with less mutually beneficial actions.)

我们互相帮助。

'We help each other.'

There are numerous other ways in which languages mark reciprocity, and I'm fairly certain most are covered in the book. From what I've read of the blurb, the book also considers whether the concept of reciprocity is the same across all languages, or if they are best viewed as a cluster of related ideas.

Some of you may be wondering why on earth anyone would be interested in reciprocals. I'm not sure if I have any real insight into the matter myself, since reciprocals don't really fascinate me the way other aspects of grammar do. Nevertheless, these constructions occur across languages (though they make take different guises), and any learner of a foreign language will have to, at some point, learn how to use such constructions in the target language.

In any case, shouldn't the sentence 'We should help one another' be something we ought to utter more often, in any language? (Sadly, the only sentence with a reciprocal that I have in Sumi is: Nikujo ithi kile acheni. 'We used to know each other.)