Consonant Aspirations - Archive

While accommodation options abound in and around the town of Kohora, for visitors planning forays into neighbouring Kaziranga National Park, one place stands out for me. It came highly  recommended by an Assamese friend who also had his wedding here at the end of December 2012, just a few weeks after my stay. The Wild Grass Lodge is located just east of the town of Kohora, a few kilometres off the main highway. If you're lucky, you might actually see the 'sign' for the place as you're driving along the highway, though most would hardly call it a sign. I don't even remember what it looks like, because I called the lodge to send a car to pick us up from Dimapur in Nagaland. It seems that there used to be clearer signage in the past, but the owner of the lodge was forced to remove it because the lodge became too popular, especially during peak periods (there's only a small window of opportunity to visit Kaziranga since the park is usually only open between No...

Even though I am not in NE India at the moment, I still have a couple of things I have been meaning to post. Back in December, after the Hornbill Festival in Kohima, I took my friend Simon to the Kaziranga National Park in neighbouring Assam. It was a convenient time to go since he was already in the area. However, February to April is usually a better time of the year to visit as the grass is not quite as tall. One of the highlights of a trip to Kaziranga National Park is going on elephant safari. There are four areas in the park that offer them, with both morning and afternoon sessions ( click here for more info ). An elephant safari lasts about an hour. However, I think this varies based on demand so it's best to check the day before, especially for the morning rides. Since we stayed at the Wild Grass Lodge, our guide organised it for us the night before. We were up bright and early for a cup of tea, before driving into the park for the 5.30am safari. The mahouts w...

A few weeks ago, I visited the Singapore Night Safari with a friend who was visiting from Australia. We spotted some mugs at the souvenir shop which featured the names of 'popular' animals translated into various languages. Incidentally, this friend of mine is also a speaker of Hebrew, and quickly pointed out the glaring error on all of the mugs. For those of you who can read Hebrew, it's a very obvious one. The word for lion in Hebrew is  אריה  ( ari ) and not הירא. While the makers of this mug have written the Hebrew word using the correct letters, they have failed to realise that unlike English, Hebrew is written from right to left, not left to right. The equivalent of this in English would be like spelling  lion  as  noil . Similarly, for 'African Elephant', we should have  פיל אפּריקני ( pil afriykaniy ). Here, the word order is also incorrect, which is expected since the writer has gone from left to right, giving us the equivalent o...

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, since I saw this advertisement at my uncle's clinic here in Singapore. It's an ad for some type of hair loss treatment. In English, the ad reads: " Male pattern hair loss can be treated ". In contrast, the Chinese (Mandarin) ad reads: 医生可以治疗你的脱发问题。 yīshēng kěyǐ zhìliáo nǐ de tuōfà wèntí which can be roughly translated as ' The doctor can treat your hair loss problem.' For now, let's just ignore the fact that English version obligatorily requires some sort of article with doctor and that doctor must be specified as being singular or plural, while the Chinese one does not. (Given the ad's location in a clinic where it was in full view of waiting patients, I interpreted it as referring to the doctor working in the clinic that day, whom the waiting patient was going to see.) Also ignore the fact that the English one specifies this as a male problem, while the Chinese one assumes that t...

[If you've come to this post because you're wondering if a particular language is 'futureless' or not, skip down right to the bottom for a summary of the various points I make in this fairly lengthy post.] This post follows on from my previous one about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. To recap, Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak may affect your savings behaviour, depending on how your language grammatically encodes statements about the future. My point in my first post was that he was drawing on research that suggests a link between language and thought, the hypothesis being that speakers of a certain language must pay attention to particular features of the world around them on a  habitual  basis because the language they speak makes it  obligatory  for them to mention such features. My concerns about his work however, start when I look at Chen's application of these ideas to the tense systems of the languag...