Consonant Aspirations - Archive

There's been quite a bit of internet buzz this past week about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. You can see his TEDx talk here: Could language affect your way to save money? as well as an attention-grabbing and rather misleading BBC article about his work:  Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire . 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. (If you're also interested, Chen's working paper can be downloaded  here . The Language Log blog actually discussed his work a year ago in two posts:  Keith Chen, Whorfian economist , where Geoff Pullum critically examines the linguistics behind the proposal; and  Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis , where Mark Liberman questions the interpretation of the statistics. Chen was also invited to write a response to those raised concerns, whic...

As I prepare to leave India again (this time to spend Christmas at home with the family for the first time in years), I thought I'd share some photos from a visit to another friend's village in Nagaland. Like Khonoma village that we also visited, Khuzama is an Angami village. You can tell it's an Angami by the suffix -ma (corresponding to Sumi village names that end in -mi ). However, most Angami speakers seem to replace the -ma with -ra / -rie  when they refer to the villages in speech. While Khonoma is a Western Angami village, Khuzama is one of the Southern Angami villages situated on the highway between Kohima and Imphal in Manipur. It's also the last Angami village before you reach the state border with Manipur and the start of Mao territory. The Maos (not to be confused with Maoists) are another related tribe. Linguistically, Southern Angami dialects are so different from Tenyidie (standard Angami based on Northen Angami) that they might constitute a differen...

Two years ago I visited Khonoma village, which is about 2 hours from Kohima (depending on road conditions). Unfortunately, the day I visited was terribly foggy and it was hard to see anything (see here ). This time, I visited again shortly after the Hornbill Festival. Thankfully the weather was much better, since I also came with a friend from Australia who may not have another chance to come back. Now, there are some friends who don't feel that Khonoma needs any special mention or recommendation. Even among my Angami friends, people from Khonoma are often perceived as being particularly proud, arrogant even. The village itself is famed for its defiance of the British which culminated in the Battle of Khonoma in 1879 that resulted in the deaths of a number of British soldiers. The villagers even manufactured their own guns, based on models acquired in the plains of Assam. This particular gun required two people to hold it up, while a third person loaded i...

So the Hornbill Festival at Kisama has come and gone. This year I brought a friend from Australia along to enjoy the festivities. After my experiences at the festival last year and the year before, I didn't really want to spend all week in Kisama, since many of the shows start to feel repetitive after a few days. I thought it'd be best if we arrive on the 4th day for the last few days, then stay back a few more days to enjoy some of the sights around Kohima when most of the other tourists would have moved on. I think it was a good decision (as I sit here typing this in our now empty guest house). My friend quite enjoyed the whole event, which his colleague in Melbourne had described last year as 'better than National Geographic', which makes me laugh a little. Sadly, in this post I won't be waxing lyrical about the festival, but would like to point out a few things that made me quite unhappy and in the process, perhaps raise a few questions about the future of t...

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...