Consonant Aspirations - Archive

Today was the first day of the 6th annual North East Indian Linguistics Society (NEILS) conference taking place this year at Tezpur University just out of the town of Tezpur, Assam. It's a great place for people for linguists and language workers and teachers working in the region to come and meet. Now, the last time I came for NEILS it was held in Shillong, Meghalaya. It was a bit of a last minute trip and I'd only decided to attend at the last moment (I actually ended up spending half that conference at Cherrapunjee near the Bangladeshi border, hiking down to see the Khasi root bridges made by 'training' ficus trees to grow their roots across rivers. It was a trip I had planned to do anyway, but it just so happened that someone else from the conference was going there at the time.) So today was my first time presenting at NEILS - I gave a talk on verb nominalisation in Sumi and how monosyllabic, disyllabic and sesquisyllabic verbs behave differently with regards...

On the Johnson blog at the Economist, there was a post a few days ago titled, "The language holding Malays, Tamils and Chinese together" , on the choice to adopt Standard English (and the author also mentions Mandarin) as the working language of the country. While I think the article itself doesn't consider the sociolinguistic reality, focusing mainly on the language policy the government had adopted - yes, Standard English has been adopted but if I were to speak 'Standard English' in most situations in Singapore, I'd be considered somewhat of a snob. You know, really tao and all. What I find ironic is that the people who push for Standard English to be spoken (some of whom have taken to defacing public signs that use 'bad English' - I'll need to find the link to this at some point), as opposed to 'Singlish' are often people whose English I would consider to be substandard. Just look at the first comment on this blog post: I have no ...

I remember a small incident from the year I spent on exchange in France. I was in Lourdes for a few days and I recall I was looking for a cemetery as I was coming down from the fort. I found a lady at the tourist counter and asked her " Excusez-moi madame, mais où est-ce que la cimetière? " ('Excuse me madame, where is 'la' cemetery?) Her reply was " Non non monsieur, c'est "le" cimetière. " ('No sir, it's 'le' cemetery.') Now I had mistaken the noun cimetière as being feminine (like a number of other nouns ending in -ière ) that needs the article la , when in actual fact it is a masculine noun. Of course, at the time I was tired, hungry and really not in the mood for a French lesson, but it's something that has stuck with me since, and I haven't forgotten the gender of the noun cimetière . It wasn't the first time I had been corrected by a complete stranger in France, and it's something I've act...

Between Assamese lessons, preparing my presentation for this coming week's North-east Linguistics Society (NEILS) conference, and being sick, I haven't had much time to blog this week. One thing I did manage to do was submit a grant application to the World Oral Literature Project (WOLP) for the documentation project Ab. and I are doing. We started fundraising in Zunheboto in early December, and just after Christmas, we got to go visit a few villages in the district to record some traditional songs associated with the agricultural year (I've saved the details for the grant application). We got to see a few activities associated with shifting cultivation (known as jhum cultivation here) like the clearing of the jungle and the breaking up of the soil, as well as the relevant songs. The villages we visited were Shoipu, Nunumi and Usütomi. While all the songs were performed for our benefit, some could be considered more 'authentic' than others - where the villager...

Months ago I commented on how BBC reporters refer to the Chinese currency, the yuan /juɛn/ 元, as the /juan/ 'you-ahn' , rhyming with 'one'. And this is despite the fact that they employ people trained in phonetics to research these things. The trend might be due to the fact that other people have started calling it the 'you-ahn', but it's not like a historic standard like saying 'Paris' with the final 's'. So what's the point then of hiring people to check these things anymore? Today, I just saw another report on the BBC about inflation in Malaysia. The reporter pronounced the name of the national currency, the ringgit , as the /rɪŋɪt/ 'ring-it', without the voiced velar stop /g/. For people who are familiar with Malay and Indonesian, if the word was meant to be pronounced that way, it would be written 'ringit'. The velar nasal is written using the digraph 'ng', while the following velar stop is written with an ...

26 January is Australia Day (to some, 'Invasion Day'), which commemorates the arrival of the First Fleet at Sydney Cove in 1788. 26 January in India is Republic Day (a different kind of 'Invasion Day' to some), which commemorates the coming into effect of the Constitution of India in 1950. I was half-jokingly saying online that in Australia, people have barbecues and may go see the fireworks. In India (or at least this part of India), people stay indoors and pray nothing gets blown up. The threat of attacks by various underground organisations in the NE is pretty high around important 'Indian' holidays like Republic Day and Independence Day. Such organisations often call for bandhs 'strikes' around these period, and if you're caught opening your shop or driving a vehicle that is not on hospital duty in some areas, your property will be torched and you may get beaten or worse, killed. People generally don't travel around these holidays and f...

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 abo...

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 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...

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 ...

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.)

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 s...

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...

Now that I'm in Guwahati and able to better control when I eat, what I eat, and how much I eat - or almost, since the guest house only has Indian food and serves dinner at 9pm (but I can choose not to eat here) - I thought I'd about my eating experiences from the past two months and some strategies I've adopted in order to survive. It's not that I was mistreated or anything, but sometimes being the guest has its risks. Also bearing in mind that every household I've been too has had different eating habits, the three main factors I want to mention here are: 1) what is being served; 2) how much is being served; and 3) when it's being served. 1. What's being served To begin with, I'm pretty lucky in that I can stomach most things - from amphibians to innards to fermented soya beans - and I can handle spicy food to a certain degree. So when my hosts ask me what I eat, I say I eat anything. But this actually surprises them, since most visitors to Nagal...

Just when I thought the adventures were coming to an end for this trip (it's less than a month till I'm back in Singapore), I arrived at Diphu station this morning at 6 to learn that the train (the Brahmaputra Mail) was late. By 10 hours. Apparently it was only leaving Dibrugarh at 10am, and would take about 6 hours to reach Diphu. As L., who's from Germany, said, "Back home, we call that a 'cancelled' train." Since I had to get to Guwahati by afternoon to move into the Guwahati University Guest House and to meet my Assamese tutors, the next best option was to catch the Mariani Guwahati Intercity Express - which my friends called the 'Mariani Special' - scheduled to leave at 8.15am and arriving at Guwahati around 1.45pm. Unlike the Brahmaputra Mail or the Jan Shatabdi (the train I had caught from Dimapur to Diphu), there are no seat reservations for the Mariani Special. The scene on the train when I boarded at Diphu looked like this. The t...

Given that I've spent most of the past week here, it's only fair I post a thing or two about Karbi Anglong. It's the largest district in the state of Assam, with its headquarters at Diphu, which surprisingly isn't even featured on the map in the Lonely Planet guide to North-east India. The name of the district translates as 'Karbi Hills', the Karbis being the dominant ethnic group here. I'm here visiting my friend L. who's been doing research on the Karbi language for some years now. I got to sit in on a few sessions with her main language consultant which was really cool. I'm also staying with a Karbi friend whom L. introduced me to when I first visited in early 2009 and have been staying at her family (apart from the 2 nights I was at Kohora). The Karbi totem pictured above is known as Jambili Athon and consists of a bird at the apex surrounded by five smaller birds and two even smaller birds on the main body of the totem. I like it becaus...

I always say that NE India really isn't like the rest of India, but something that does remind me that I'm in India are the brands of English I hear around me. They're not all the same, but given the prevalence of Indian TV here and the fact that many English teachers have come  / still come from the 'mainland' (the rest of India), I often still find some features I associate more with Indian English here. (I'm also aware that Indian English itself comprises numerous variants, but this is my own overgeneralised impression.) It's not so much the phonology (speech sounds) and intonation I notice - there are too many accents, which seem more heavily influenced by speakers' first language. As a point, my Sumi and Angami friends often make fun of the English spoken by Ao speakers. Rather, it's certain collocations that use the verb 'take' that have stuck in my mind and after two months here I've taken to using some of them in my daily life ...

If you visit Nagaland, one thing you may notice on the drive from Dimapur to Kohima are signs along the highway issuing warnings to drivers. They generally start with 'Bro' and are followed by the usual 'Watch your speed' or 'No mobile while driving'. Some even extend into the realm of the philosophical, with sayings like 'Money Isn't Everything'. But if your initial impression - like mine was - is that these signs are trying to appeal to younger male drivers and / or are being sexist in assuming all drivers are male, think again. 'BRO' just stands for 'Border Roads Organisation'. Still I can't help but feel that the sign makers are aware that 'BRO' is read as 'Bro' and are using it to their advantage, sexist as it may be.

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...

Doing linguistic / anthropological fieldwork in any place which isn't your own native environment can be a daunting task. Alhough I wasn't doing fieldwork this week, some of the principles of surviving fieldwork still apply. Many people doing fieldwork have the romantic notion of 'living like the locals' (that's also assuming all 'locals' live the same way which isn't the case), but for a healthy fieldwork experience - and I'm speaking only from personal experience - there are three necessary conditions that need to be met to the satisfaction of the researcher. If these are not met, one should get out of the situation before it takes its psychological toll with the researcher wondering what the heck they're doing there, longing to hide in a room or run away, and basically not getting much research done. For the sake of alliteration, I'm naming them: Space , Stimulation and Sanitation . But before I talk about them, here's a little pr...

The other day as I was going through the Sumi-English dictionary by Lozhevi Sema, I found this verb: yekhi : ala lakha, yekha keu akushino azü yekhakeu = to block road; to dam to fish. While my friends weren't too familiar with this particular entry, it seems to refer to blocking either a road or a river (the latter for the purpose of catching fish). This immediately brought to mind what happened last week as we were travelling back to Zunheboto after doing some cultural documentation in a few villages. We were crossing the Lanki River - which I dubbed the 'Lion King' river - when a rather peculiar sight greeted us. The Lanki River First, I couldn't make out where we were meant to ford the river, but the driver didn't have any problem plunging the car right into part of the river. When we emerged on the embankment in the middle of the river, there was a car parked on it, with a few men in military uniform standing around with guns - members of the Underg...

On the weekend, the government announced that, apart from Pakistani and Chinese citizens, foreigners would require  no special permits to visit N-East  for 2011. They will require to register - I'm assuming at the local police station - within 24 hours upon arrival. They're trialling this idea for one year, and the permit exemption programme will apply to the states of Nagaland, Manipur and Mizoram. (Arunachal Pradesh is still pretty sensitive given that China still claims it as part of their territory and like people I've spoken with in Nepal, there's the belief that China will invade within the next decade or two.) This is fantastic news, since I won't have to worry about getting a Restricted Area Permit or RAP (also known as a Protected Area Permit or PAP) the next time I come back this year. The process of obtaining one is lengthy. First, you either need to apply and travel as a group of four, or as a married couple. Since I am neither of these (although my po...

Happy New Year from Nagaland! Now, going back to Australia for a second, most Australians associate (or have associated) Canberra with being able to legally purchase porn and fireworks. It's a bit of a misconception, since fireworks are no longer freely available in the nation's capital and seriously, who buys porn in shops anymore? Anyway, I have a point somewhere here. With Christmas and New Year's over, there's been a helluva lot of fireworks (locally known as 'bombs' here). While fireworks for New Year's is fairly standard for me, nowhere have I seen Christmas celebrating with such prolific use of explosives. It's a wonder I got any sleep on Christmas Eve. But - apart from the loud intermittent blasts throughout the night - it was the packaging that really caught my attention. Most packaging looks fairly tame, bordering on family friendly even, but note the position of the woman's hand in this picture: Others, on the other hand, are a li...