Consonant Aspirations - Archive

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 h jo]). 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 Zha ng  in pinyin and pronounced as / tʂaŋ/ (tone not given) - it's like saying ...

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...

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 c...

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 , ...

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.

'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 faci...

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 t...

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.

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. Langu...

This post is actually about code switching on one's Facebook wall and negotiating this particularly virtual space. [EDIT: I've made a few changes to the original because it sounded a lot more aggressive than I intended it to be.] Earlier this week, I'd posted this on an Australian friend's Facebook wall: Quoi de neuf? What's this about living semi-permanently in XXXX? This was in response to something I'd read about him moving back to XXXX. I used the French for 'What's new?' at the start because he's living in France and I knew that he had been learning French. I didn't want to write the whole post in French because I wasn't sure of his current level. However, his reply was about 4 lines long, completely in French. It was actually a piece of bad news, but I assume he felt comfortable enough to put it on his wall, even if most of his friends don't speak French. His switching from English to French made me feel like he was pri...

On the weekend I was having brunch with a polyglot friend who asked me, "How do you answer the question, 'How many languages do you speak?'" Before I continue, I should point out that just about everyone I know who has had to say, "I'm a linguist" or "I study linguistics" has also faced the inevitable question, "So how many languages do you speak?" It's such a common phenomenon that most language / linguistics-related blogs would have a post covering the topic and there's even a Facebook group named 'You're a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?' (The other usual comment is "I'd better watch what I say around you" and I've even had a good friend who was shocked when he realised I wasn't a grammar Nazi or a punctuation Nazi (like srsly, wtf?)) Anyway (and before this post spirals into a rant about how linguists should not be expected to be polyglots), the question asked by my friend ...

It's been 6 months since my blog post. A lot has happened since then, not all of it India-related. But I'm back and eagerly awaiting my return to Assam and Nagaland. First, a shout-out to my friend Abokali for the amazing work she's been doing the past year keeping up the documentation of traditional Sumi songs and knowledge. She's got her own awesome blog here at: http://thevillagemicroscope.blogspot.com/ Her brother Canato also has a blog - check out his fantastic artwork at: http://canajimo.blogspot.com/ So the big news is that we've received two grants this year. One from the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, and another from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), the granting component of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project . These grants are for project that aims to document traditional songs and stories of the Sumis of Nagaland. I was around last year to help with a few pilot recordings last December (see ph...