Consonant Aspirations - Archive

Just a few doors down from the guest house. When I first saw it, I thought it was some weird three-legged cow.

Last night over dessert Lauren and I got into talking about the recent discussion on the RNLD  (Research Network for Linguistic Diversity) mailing list concerning getting informed participant consent in linguistic research to study their language as well as permission to store recordings on a computer and allow the (controlled) release of such data. Much of the discussion appears to focus on non-literate communities. In our experience and from what we've been told / read, speakers of minority languages don't usually see much value in having their language studied. There's usually little problem getting 'permission' to study a minority language - speakers are either happy that someone's interested in their language or confused as to why anyone would bother with it. Lauren and I both don't like the idea of 'imposing' ourselves on a language community (or speaker) and it would certainly be easier if the community simply asked for the help of a lingu...

Last week when I was in Singapore, I caught a documentary titled Yarshagumba: The Himalayan Viagra  which aired on the Australia Network. The documentary was about a fungus / herb that grows in the Himalayas that Nepalis risk their lives to collect every spring. The fungus in question is popularly known as 'cordyceps' (though 'cordyceps sinensis' is the scientific name for the particular species that is usually sold). It's an earthy (and by earthy I mean dirty) looking herb I'd seen quite often in the windows of Chinese medicine shops, but apart from the name, I didn't know what it was, let alone what it was used for. According to Wikipedia, the Nepali word yarshagumba  यार्शागुम्बा (even though it's transliterated as 'sh' Nepali doesn't distinguish the sounds 'sh' and 's') is derived from the Tibetan yartsa gumbu   དབྱར་རྩྭ་དགུན་འབུ (literally, 'summer herb winter worm'). Similarly in Chinese you have  冬虫夏草  (litera...

Arrived safely in Kathmandu yesterday. Singapore seems a world away. Except that all the tourist-oriented cafes look like they belong in Singapore, with prices to match. My friend  Lauren came to pick me up from the airport with the guy from the guest house we're staying at. It's always nice to see a familiar face upon arrival. I've start Nepali lessons tomorrow. I've booked in for about 15 hours of lessons starting tomorrow, with plenty of opportunity to practise out of class. I'm also meeting a speaker of Kagate (that Lauren introduced me to online) later in the week to talk about some dictionary making. I thinking I'll use a program called WeSay , but more on that later this week. At the moment, my Nepali is really basic, but knowing some Hindi helps, and I can read Devanagari alright, albeit very slowly. My main problem now is that because I spent the last few days on Bintan (an Indonesian island just 1 hour away from Singapore), my brain keeps going to...

Over lunch today, my brother mentioned that our grandmother (and I suppose a number of our older relatives here in Singapore) often ask the question: "You know how to eat ______? "  about any local dish ranging from  buah keluak  (sometimes translated as candlestick nuts) to steamed pomfret. The thing is, the question isn't about whether we know the method or art of eating that particular dish (usually: open mouth, insert food, masticate, swallow). It's about whether we eat the dish at all, with the implication that we like to eat it. The form of the question is most likely a calque or word for word borrowing from a southern Chinese language/dialect like Teochew or Hokkien. Mum said the question in Teochew over lunch: leu hiau chiat?  (lit. 'you know eat?') (not really sure how to transliterate these), where hiau is a modal verb that can be translated as 'can' (in the sense of possessing the general ability) or 'know'. Other languages ofte...

Over lunch yesterday, a few Singaporean friends and I were celebrating the fact that 'friend' is now a commonly used verb. Prior to the advent of Facebook, 'friend' as verb - pronounced closer to 'fren' - had been relegated to the realm of Singlish kid speak. For example: Kid 1: I fren u, u fren me. Kid 2: (I) Dun fren u. ('dun' sounds like 'doe' with vowel nasalisation - derived from 'don't') Or something like that - it's been a while since I was in kindergarten. It conveys a sense of liking someone, something to the effect of 'I want to be friends with you, do you want to be friends with me?'. But adults may still jokingly say to one another, 'I dun/donch fren you' if the other person offends them mildly. I then asked people if they preferred the verb 'unfriend' or 'defriend' (neither of which is in Singlish kid speak). The unanimous response at the table was 'unfriend', even th...

A few days ago I was wandering my favourite section at my favourite bookshop in Singapore - the languages section at Books Kinokuniya at Takashimaya. I came across a small booklet titled  Diverse Languages, One Identity , "a joint initiative between the National Institute of Education (NIE) and the National Library Board. As you can see, the booklet covers basic conversations in the four official languages of Singapore: English, Mandarin Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The blurb on the back adds, "This booklet aims to create an awareness of the spoken mother tongue among students and teachers and serves as a good platform to build understanding and respect among the various races in Singapore." Usually I'd be quick to dismiss any attempts by a national board to encourage a more 'cohesive' society (think 'Racial Harmony Day'), but given the focus on language, I thought I'd give it a second glance. The NIE news says the launch date for the bookl...

It's back to the world of blogging for me, as I spend two weeks of limbo in Singapore waiting my visas to Nepal and India to be processed. With the MA in Linguistics behind me, I suppose it's time for another adventure. This next trip starts with three weeks in Kathmandu, followed by two weeks of trekking in the Khumbu region around Everest. I'll be flying to India in early November, where I plan to be in the North east from early November to late January 2011.  I've never been to Nepal, and I only spent a few weeks in NE India in early 2009. (My last memory of Nagaland was getting poisoned by my breakfast omelette at the Hotel Japfü before having to catch a -thankfully quick- train from Dimapur to Diphu that same day.) I'm interested in work that's happening in Nepal on endangered languages and looking at what can be done in NE India, which in theory is the main motivation for the blog. Of course, there'll be the odd hellish travel story (with details s...