Cursing in Sherpa

Going through the recently published Sherpa-English dictionary looking for volitional / non-volitional verb sets before next week's trip to Khumbu / Everest region, I found this nice little curse in Sherpa:


རྨིག་དུང་རྐྱའུ།
(mīkdung gyau)

The translation: 'May you be buried in a hole!'

I suppose not all of us can get a decent sky burial.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Facing up to your food

Image
I often believe that if people living in cities in developed countries had to kill their own animals for meat, meat consumption would be much lower than it is. My mum would always tell us that back during those kampong days  in Singapore (when most of the population lived in small villages across the island) they had to kill their own chickens for food. Fast forward to today's Singapore, and there are people who've never seen a live chicken, though they may have eaten plenty of them. A few years ago, a friend of mine in Melbourne decided to stop being a vegetarian. However, in order to make the transition, he decided he had to kill a chicken himself, which I suppose was a symbolic gesture to acknowledge life he was killing simply by purchasing and consuming meat. (Jed, if you're reading this, correct me if I'm wrong.) A few weeks ago, while I was staying at my friends' place in Kohima, she asked half-jokingly if I wanted to kill the chicken that a relative had gi...
Read more

Singlish: Creole, creoloid, creolized language?

Today's post is brought to you by "ongoing problems with terminology in linguistics". As my newsfeed this week has filled up with reblogged and retweeted articles about Singlish, often the first thing that gets mentioned is that Singlish is an English-based "creole". But what exactly does the term creole mean? In many introductory linguistics textbooks, dictionaries and the Wikipedia entry (at the time of writing), the term creole (or creole language ) is mostly commonly defined as a stable natural language that has developed from a pidgin, while  pidgin  is typically defined as a simplified contact language developed to enable speakers of different languages to communicate. In other words, a pidgin is said to become a creole when children learn it as their first language and the new language develops its own set of rules and conventions - its own grammar. That means that languages which have "Pidgin" in their names, such as Hawaiian Pidgin,...
Read more

Fun with tone sandhi - The solution!

Image
Okay, I apologise for the long delay, but finally(!), I present you with the solution to the problem set I posted in my last blog post, many months ago (see here ). (Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'. Or  click here for an image you can magnify. )  The language is Singaporean  Teochew , as spoken by an aunt of mine who lives in Singapore. It's part of the Min Nan group of languages, but Singaporean Teochew is said to have undergone dialect leveling with Singaporean Hokkien - the two are much more mutually intelligible than their counterparts still spoken in China today. Also, although most descriptions of Teochew give 8 tones, I've only been able to find 7 contrastive ones - but there might still be an 8th one that I've missed! I know I was supposed to post this in mid-June, but a lot of stuff came up, including a move to the United States (via Australia). As some of you may already know, I've just started grad school at ...
Read more