Consonant Aspirations - Archive

As I'll be heading back to Nagaland in a few days' time for the Hornbill Festival, I thought I'd finish posting about some of the sightseeing I've been doing in Guwahati the past two weeks. Last week, my friend A. S. dropped into Guwahati for a few days and we ended up doing a bit of sightseeing, visiting places that I hadn't been to, even though I've been in Guwahati since August, and this is the 2nd extended stay here. One place we visited was the Umananda Mandir on Peacock Island, situated in the middle of the Brahmaputra, just north of the city. I'd seen the island many times from my walks along the Brahmaputra, but had never actually visited the island. Getting there isn't too difficult. There are ferries (shared or for individual hire) at Sukreswar Ghat (or rather, the makeshift ghat next to the Sukreswar Ghat park between Fancy Bazar and Pan Bazar). We paid Rs 550 to hire a whole boat to take us to the island and back at our own leisure, b...

Whenever I'm in India, I'm often struck by the 'extreme brevity' of some of the text messaging language or textese here. It may certainly be as extreme back in Australia among certain age groups, but I don't communicate via phone with any of these groups. Here are just a few examples of messages I've received over the past few months. See if you can decipher what they mean. 1)  M sori 2 say bt gues i wont b able 2 mak it on tuesday bcoz of d shftn... Will it b k if we mit on friday noon?? 2)  U cn kum 2 r plc bt d thng s we rnt stl proprly stld so it may b an inconvinc 4 u! If not u r most wlkum :-) 3)  Its fyn... Do tk kr of ur health! So wn shl we mit? Ran ut of sms blnc! [My apologies if I cause any embarrassment here. However, my point is not to embarrass, but to simply show examples of textese.] You can see typical features of textese such as vowel deletion and the Rebus principle , whereby a letter or number that sounds like the word is used ...

I saw this comic on xkcd last week ( link ): (Or a cabbage, for that matter. The goat makes sense. Goats are fine.) Too true. Anyway, I showed this to an Assamese friend of mine, who told me that the Assamese version contained a tiger, not a wolf. But then again, he added, a 'wolf' in Assamese is literally a 'dog-tailed tiger' (with a little sound change involved). So here we have the word for 'wolf' in Assamese: কুকুৰনেচীয়া বাঘ   kukurnesiyaa bagh -  it also could be transliterated as kukurnechiyaa , but the transliterated 'ch' is pronounced like [s] in Assamese. We can clearly see the words  কুকুৰ   kukur 'dog' and  বঘ  bagh 'tiger'. We can also kinda see the word for 'tail', which in Assamese is নেজ nez -  it could also be transliterated as nej , but in Assamese, what is transliterated as 'j' can also be pronounced as [z]. At this point you may be wondering how or why  কুকুৰনেচীয়া  kukurnesiyaa a...

The final performance at last week's Ahuna festival in Zunheboto was by the boys from North Point Colony, Zunheboto. They performed the game/dance called Imu no pi 'süjo süjo' , which translates as 'My older brother said 'sujo sujo'.' The word  süjo is a verb meaning 'to pull out'. Here are some photos and videos of the game. One guy has a 'tiger's tail' attached to his behind.    Despite the fact that it's quite a famous game here, I'd never actually seen it before. I tried asking friends about the rules of the game, but no one could really tell me what they were. A few days later, I asked H. S. Rotokha what the significance of the game was. He told me that there was once a man who had three sons. When the man was about to die, he called his sons together to tell them not to fight among each other after his death, lest their enemies take advantage of this. Unfortunately, at this point in our conversation,...

So the turn-out at the Ahuna celebration in Zunheboto was small in comparison to the one in Dimapur, but here were some of the highlights of the cultural performances. I was a little disappointed that the organisers decided to make all 4 cultural troupes perform at the same time, so you'd have to rush from performance to performance, with no clear sense of what you were seeing if you didn't already know what the troupes were doing (and also only if you were lucky enough to be able to enter the performance area - most of the spectators from the town had to sit at a distance). Thankfully, I was allowed into the performance area, and was already familiar with most of the performances because of the cultural documentation project. The villagers from Chishilimi perform the rain invocation ceremony called Tala Dala (or Dala Dala ). According to them, they are the only Sumi village to perform this ceremony, which involves two rows of men taking turns to hit a raised mound of eart...

I was in Zunheboto town all of last week for the Ahuna  / Ahunah  (post-harvest) festival, and to get some project work done. I'm still recovering from the trip back to Guwahati, but here's a quick recap of last week's events. Monday night, we had the premiere of the film The Silent Field , or  Yenguyelei Qha  in Sumi. It's something that has come out of the cultural documentation project that Abokali and I have been working on the past 2 years with H.S. Rotokha and Pukhazhe Yepthomi. Most of the work on this film was done by Abokali and our wonderful video editor Vito Sumi (who had to work with most of our amateur footage), but I'll get to that in another blog post. Just to be clear, it's still a first edit that we were trying to rush for this year's Ahuna festival, but we hope people still enjoyed it. From L to R: Me, H. S. Rotokha, Abokali Sumi, Pukhazhe Yepthomi. Before I get into the cultural activities in my next post, I thought I'd just t...

Happy Deepavali / Dipaboli / Diwali to all who celebrate it (and happy Tihar if you're in Nepal). I'm actually currently in Zunheboto, Nagaland for the Ahunah festival - Ahunah lokivi peitha tsü ani!  (but more on that when I find the time and internet to post later during the week.) In honour of Diwali, here are some photos I took last Monday as I was walking past Dighalipukhuri in Guwahati. I saw the entire pond lined with lit clay lamps ( dīpa in Sanskrit, but saki in Assamese). I mistakenly thought it was an early Diwali celebration, but my students told me later (and I should have realised it myself) that it was actually to mark the death anniversary of Bhupen Hazarika, who passed away a year ago on the 5th of November. It really was an impressive sight to see the whole lake lined with lamps that had to be lit individually. I wonder if they're doing something similar for Diwali itself today.

As part of the festivities for the annual post-harvest festival  Ahunah (or  Ahuna ) in Zunheboto, the Sumi Cultural Association will be premiering the documentary The Silent Field (Yenguyelei Qha) today at 4.30pm at the Zunheboto Town Hall. Shot over two years in villages across the district of Zunheboto, this film presents a selection of recorded material that covers over 25 groups performing different cultural activities associated with the traditional Sumi agricultural cycle. The film is part of a larger project aimed at documenting traditional rituals and songs that are no longer being transmitted to the next generation. Its title reflects the current anxiety associated with the loss of culture and identity among the Sumis. A collaboration between old and young, foreign and local, this project hopes to create awareness and interest in traditional Sumi customs, and to help preserve the Sumi language and its various verbal art forms. The makers of the film acknow...

Last weekend, I needed a little time-out from everything. Things have been difficult for me on a lot of fronts lately. Fortunately, I knew someone residing at a place on the road between Guwahati and Shillong in neighbouring Meghalaya that sounded like a good retreat for the weekend. Even better, I managed to score a ride with some friends heading up to Shillong for a conference. The place is called the 'Rural Resource and Training Centre' (or RRTC). If you're coming from Guwahati, it's about 18km past Nongpoh, near the town of Umran. It's one of many Don Bosco initiatives all over NE India. I was already friends with one of the two main priests based at the centre, Father Jose, a linguist who speaks many languages of the NE, and who's currently working on a dictionary of Tiwa. I was introduced to the other main priest, Father James during the course of my stay, who proved to be quite a magician and aping pong player! The centre typically hosts l...