Where are you from?

That last post reminded me of the oddest and most annoying conversation I've ever had about my origins. It was with a German guy who I met while I was living in Lyon, France. The conversation was in English and went something like this :

- Where are you from?
- Singapore, but I live in Australia.
- No, where are you from originally?
- I was born in Singapore.
- Yes, but where are your parents from?
- They were born in Singapore.
- What about your grandparents?
- My grandmothers are from SE Asia, but my grandfathers were from China.
- Oh, so you're from China!

There was sure no fooling this guy...

I come from a land down under

One of the first things I learn to say in a foreign language is how to say, "I'm from..." or "I come from...", mainly because one of the first things people ask me is where I'm from. It's also a reasonable useful phrase for any language learner.

However, I find the phrase tricky to learn for 2 reasons. The first one is probably more specific to the geographically displaced person that I am. I usually say "I come from Singapore but live in Australia", even if my friends in Nepal and India will typically introduce me as their friend from Australia. It just seems less troublesome when I'm travelling in Asia and Europe, especially since I don't look like what many people expect an Australian to look like i.e. white, nor do I sound particularly Australian (although I did meet an American lady who insisted I had an Australian accent, which I found rather puzzling).

But discounting any potential geographic confusion of one's origins, the phrase is potentially problematic if you're asking for a literal translation in another language. I've found a few times that when I ask people how to say "I come from...", they often give me a sentence that is better translated as 'I am coming from...' or 'I have come from...', which tells the hearer the last place I visited, as opposed to my country / land of origin.

I suspect it's translating the verb 'come' that throws my tutors off - they're trying to convey the meaning of motion, when the English doesn't actually convey this.

Using the verb venir 'to come' works fine in French, although it's possible to just use the verb 'to be' and a preposition:
Je viens de Singapour 'I come from Singapore.'
Je suis de Singapour. 'I am from Singapore.'

But in Russian, what I'd say is:
Я из Сингапура ya iz Singapur-a 'I am from Singapore.' (lit. 'I from Singapore' with a preposition and no verb meaning 'to be')
I can't even think of a verb corresponding to 'come' that would be appropriate here. If I did use one here, I'd feel like I was talking about recently arriving from Singapore.

Similarly, in (Lower) Assamese I was first taught:
[would love to put the Assamese text here at some point]
Moy Singapur-pora ahisu.
(forgive the transliteration, this was based on my own transcriptions, and I have a LOT of trouble with the back vowels)

And in Sumi:
Niye Singapur lono ighi va.

However, both literally mean, 'I have come from Singapore.' (or to match the word order, 'I Singapore from have come'). The form of the verb 'to come' ahisu in (Lower) Assamese and the use of va with the verb ighi 'to come' in Sumi are used in sentences that one would typically translate as being in the perfect aspect in English. I suspect that both sentences suggest that I have recently arrived from Singapore, which is not the intended meaning.

Rather, in order to convey the meaning of origin, it might be necessary in languages to say something like 'I am Singaporean.' In Chinese, I would probably say:
我是新加坡人。
wo shi xinjiapo ren
(where 人 ren means 'person'.)

In Sumi, the equivalent of this would be:
Niye Singapur-mi.
with the suffix -mi meaning 'person' and no verb meaning 'to be'.

Alternatively, what I've learn to say in Nepali, is:
मेरो देश सिंगापुर हो, तर म ऑस्ट्रेलियामा बास्छु।
mero des Singaapur ho, tara ma Australiya-maa baaschhu
which literally means 'My country (des) is Singapore, but I live in Australia.'

Similarly, in Assamese, I can say:
mor dex Singapore, kintu moi bortoman Australiat thaku
'My country is Singapore, but nowadays I live in Australia.'

Of course, this often assumes that your country of origin is the same as your current nationality, which is not always the case. However, things are never that simple - some people I know who read this blog certainly have more complicated geographical origins!

I'd therefore be interested to hear of other ways to introduce where you come from in these and other languages. I'd also be interested to know why people choose to introduce themselves in this particular way.

Eventually, I suppose I will start introducing myself as being 'Australian'. Although I'm more likely to give a nod to Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton and say, "I am Australian", instead of "I come from a land down under."

Tea vs Chai, the Tekka Centre and my last name (II)

In yesterday's post I talked about the correspondence between Hokkien 't' and Mandarin 'zh' (a retroflex sound produced with the tongue slightly further back than the sound represented by 'ch' in 'chunk' and without the puff of air). Both sounds are descended from an earlier 'tr' cluster in Early Middle Chinese, as reconstructed by historical linguists.

What does this have to do with the word for 'tea'?

People who know Hindi, may laugh surreptitiously when they hear people order a 'chai tea', since चय chay means 'tea' in Hindi, so the order is basically for a 'tea tea'. In English though, 'chai tea' is perfectly acceptable because the word 'chai' has been borrowed to designate what one would call मसाला चय masaalaa chai 'spiced tea' in India.

The Hindi word for tea is चय chay is much closer to the Mandarin cha (the 'ch' sound here is pronounced like the retoflex 'zh', the only difference is that it is accompanied by a puff of air). Other Indo-Aryan languages like Nepali have चिया chiyā. Within Indo-European, we also have Russian чай chay. The Japanese also use cha. In contrast, English has tea, French thé and Malay teh. Hebrew too uses תה te (I was taught that תה נענע te nana is '(spear)mint tea' in Hebrew). These languages all have a word for 'tea' that's closer to the Hokkien / Minnan word te (tone not given).

The reason for this difference is that languages like English borrowed (whether directly or indirectly) the word from one of the Minnan dialects / languages, while languages like Russian and Hindi borrowed the word from other Chinese languages like Mandarin or Cantonese. The Wikipedia article explains this in greater detail and gives more examples from other languages.

Etymologically though, Mandarin cha and Hokkien te share the same origin. Pulleyblank (1991) gives the reconstructed forms draɨ /drɛ (Early Middle Chinese) and trɦa: (Late Middle Chinese). Again, we see the correspondence between the Mandarin retroflex sounds (written in pinyin as 'zh' and 'ch') and Minnan 't',

So voilà, it took me two posts to do it, but there you have it - the common thread linking my last name, the name of the Tekka Centre and the name of one of the most consumed beverages on the planet.

[This post was inspired by 3 separate conversations I've had in the last month about each of these topics. Tomorrow I'm off to the great tea-growing state of Assam in NE India. The word in Assamese চাহ (transliterated as chah) is clearly related to the non-Minnan form of the word, but is now pronounced 'sah' in Assamese. Something for me to get used to saying again!]

Tea vs Chai, the Tekka Centre and my last name (I)

This post is about three things: (1) the name of a very popular beverage that the vast majority of readers would be familiar with; (2) the name of a building complex near Little India that most Singaporeans would be familiar with; and (3) my family name, which only my friends would be familiar with (but which is actually a pretty common Chinese name around the world).

And yes, there's a linguistic point to all of this.

Let's start with what's least familiar: my last name, which happens to be Teo (I pronounce it as [t^hjo]). It is a Hokkine / Minnan name that has its origins in southern China. While it may not look familiar to most people outside SE Asia, it's actually etymologically related to one of the most common Chinese surnames around the world. The Chinese character used to write it is 张 (simplified) or 張 (traditional). The standard Mandarin equivalent is transliterated as Zhang in pinyin and pronounced as /tʂaŋ/ (tone not given) - it's like saying 'chunk', but (a) you don't have a final 'k' sound and (b) when you pronounce 'ch' sound, your tongue curls back a bit (this is what is called a 'retroflex' sound) and you shouldn't have a strong puff of air. The Cantonese equivalents I believe are transliterated as Cheung, Cheong or Chong, depending on the transliteration system.

Most of you will probably have started to recognise these names and probably even know people with one of these names. But you've also probably noticed that while the Mandarin and Cantonese forms look quite similar, the Minnan name Teo doesn't look (or sound) anything like the others. So how is it related?

Before I get to that point, let's look at the name of a famous building complex located in Little India, Singapore: the Tekka Centre. (I was just there a week ago with a friend from Australia.)

The Wikipedia article gives the original (Hokkien) name of the market as Tek Kia Kha, meaning 'foot of the small bamboos' which was eventually shortened to Tekka. For those who can read Chinese, you'll notice on the right the Chinese characters 竹 'bamboo' and 脚 'leg / foot'. The standard Mandarin reading of 竹 is zhu in pinyin and pronounced /tʂu/, while in Hokkien 竹 is transliterated as tek and pronounced something like /tɛk/.

Now I remember going on a school trip to Little India in the 1990s and being utterly confused because the centre had been renamed the 'Zhujiao Centre' to match the Mandarin reading of 竹脚. In reality, almost everyone still referred to it as the 'Tekka Market'. The building has since been renamed the 'Tekka Centre' to avoid confusion (which Wikipedia tells me happened in 2000).

The point was, I could see no resemblance between Mandarin zhu and Hokkien tek. Since then, I've also learnt a lot more about historical sound changes, and noticed other examples of Mandarin 'zh' (a retroflex sound) corresponding to Hokkien 't', like with my last name. Simply put, they are both said to have descended from a sequence of 't' and 'r' early in the history of Chinese. In the Minnan languages / dialects, including Hokkien, the 'r' sound was lost, while in other varieties, including standard Mandarin, the combination of 'tr' became a retroflex sound, as represented in pinyin by the letters zh. Pulleyblank (1991) reconstructs the pronunciation of 竹 as truwk in Early Middle Chinese and triwk in Late Middle Chinese. Guillaume Jacques here also gives 'tr' as an initial in Early Middle Chinese, with the pronunciation of 张 reconstructed as 'trjang'. We still see the 'tr' combination in the Vietnamese surname Trương / Truong. (Vietnamese is not Sinitic, but it was heavily influenced by it for centuries.)

Of course, this only explains how the first sounds in Teo and tek in Hokkien correspond to Zhang and zhu in Mandarin. To explain the rest would require more than a humble blog post.

So what does this have to do with all the tea in China (and all the chai in India)? Check out tomorrow's post.

Feature phones

Most people would now be familiar with the term smartphone, and have at least some idea as to what a smartphone is. Yesterday, my friend R. taught me a new term (for an old thing): feature phone.

Unlike most people I know, I don't own an iPhone or an Android phone (something that surprises my friends I appear to always be on Facebook and Twitter). When I'm in Melbourne, I still use a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic from back in 2009. I don't think it's the best example of a smartphone - but it has pretty advanced computing ability and allows me to connect to internet (via a wifi connection) and use Bluetooth.

However, on my last trip to Nepal and India, I was hesitant to take the phone with me for a number of reasons. One, the battery life is poor - I'd have to recharge it at least once every two days and given that electricity isn't always guaranteed, I'd find myself without a usable phone for longer than I'd like. Two, it's not particularly durable and I'd worry about dropping it and breaking it in a remote area with no hope of getting it fixed. Three, it was locked to a particular network in Australia, and while I could have got it unlocked, it didn't seem the effort given the first two reasons.

So, instead I brought my old Nokia 3100 (really really classic old school Nokia), which my friend told me was a feature phone: basically, any mobile phone that isn't a smartphone. People in the industry might have more sophisticated ways of distinguishing the two, although the Wikipedia article suggests that there isn't an official definition for either smartphone or feature phone. In any case, I don't think there'd be any case to suggest my Nokia 3100 was a smartphone.

I got this phone back in 2004 and since then, it's followed me around the world twice. I took it with me when I went on exchange to Russia and France and then when I was teaching English in Xinjiang. It was great last year in Nepal and India because it was everything my other phone wasn't: The battery lasts a few days before I have to charge it. I've dropped it a few times, but it still kept going. And I can put it just about any SIM card I like. Basically, everything I want in a phone when I'm out in a remote area doing fieldwork. I don't know how long more it'll last, but I intend to use till it finally goes the way of all phones.

Ironically, the last time I was in Nagaland, I noticed quite a few people actually did have the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. A friend of mine even used his to play music - something I had never considered doing on the phone, despite the name of the model - while we driving from Zunheboto to Kohima. Sadly, before we even got halfway there, the battery had died.

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.)