Are you cidding me?

We landed up at a buffet lunch in a little town in the Sahyadris at the tail end of the monsoon. The spread was amazing for its creativity, with spellings. Looking at the stemed rice, I was happy that it wasn’t the lice that it sometimes becomes in China. Was the moousses a tiny bit … squeaky? The colslow disappeared off the board pretty quickly. And the pudding was a marbel.

The problem with English orthography was stated very cogently by an Australian educator, Mark O’Connor: “Spelling is a distinct problem to the native-born, who find that because neither sound nor analogy with other words is a reliable guide, thousands of spellings must in effect be memorized individually.” That would mean that learning to write in English is no easier than learning to write Mandarin. In most north Indian languages, on the other hand, orthography is fairly regular: one letter for one sound. So you are mostly right if you write what you hear. This leads many literate Indians to make the same assumption about English. All of the creative spellings you see in these photos seem to come from such a logic. Of all the attempts to reform English orthography, the only one that has caught on, especially due to spell-check programs, is that by Noah Webster. Clearly more is needed, because there are more sounds in the English language than the number of letters. Maybe English should be written out in the Devanagari script.

Litchi predicts the fate of Web 2.0

This has been a grand year for litchis (Litchi chinensis) as far as we are concerned. The bowl you see here is the final batch, which we found at the local vendor a little after the end of the season. These photogenic red skinned litchis are not the best though. For almost a century, the queen of litchis has been the variety from Muzaffarpur, a district of Bihar just north of the Ganga. The season for this variety lasts for about two weeks, and the skin is a dusty brown in colour. But for all that, the fruit is juicy and delicious.

As I began to write this post I wondered why the spelling that I use, litchi, is beginning to be eclipsed by lychee. Both are transliterations of the Chinese word for the fruit (荔枝, which in Pinyin would be written as Lìzhī). Litchi was the first published transliteration, having been used in the first botanical description published in 1782 by Pierre Sonnerat. I turned to Google ngrams, and found that the alternative spelling has been popular in brief spurts in every century. The first time lychee eclipsed litchi was in 1860s. Then again the variant was briefly dominant in the 1960s. My guess is that these spurts are due to passing cultural fads. So what could be the recent dominance due to?

The spelling lychee outdid litchi for a period which started in late 2005. Recently litchi has been catching up again. Casting a net for the name of the fad, I found that the phrase Web 2.0 closely tracks the excess of lychee over litchi. Is the declining dominance of the spelling lychee then an indicator that the social media boom is now heading to a bust?

The trouble with English

Grimulee is not a word? What kind of a language is this? What could it mean, you ask? Why, it is a verb that describes the act of grimuling. Grimuling? Simple. The act of reducing an opponent to abject terror at their impending loss in a board game. “This much English even Chetan Bhagat can write,” to quote a currently fashionable put down. I’m sure that the person whom New York Times once called “the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history” is not going to insist on an apology.

The language of roads

Looking through my photo archives for June, a decade back, I realized that I passed through Nice. I’d taken a lot of photos that clutter up tourist’s hard disk. But among them I came across this photo of the road seen as a black board. When we walk or drive we read the road in more senses than one: not just watching and reacting to traffic and pedestrians, but also to signs, many of which are written on to the surface of the roads. But looking at them from top makes everything look different. Are these markings a language? Like language they are arbitrary signs to which we give meaning. A dashed line means something different from a continuous line. Some combinations of dashed and continuous lines are allowed, some not; these are rules of grammar, and they can be different in different countries. Interesting, where your mind can wander if there are no warning signs to prevent it from meandering.

Semiotics in the air

The Family assures me that I’m wrong about this sign in front of my seat on one of the new Airbus A320 Neos. but I’m not so sure. I puzzled about it for a while, before I discarded the idea that this shows where to look for blond wigs. I think Airbus has put stowage space under each seat for women’s underwear. I think I should find it outrageous that they have not provided for men’s underwear. I looked at the signs in front of some of the other seats too, so it’s the whole plane.

Fruits and bananas

A few days ago I was one of the naive people who believed that bananas were just another fruit. That was before I went to Mylapore and realized the errors of my ways. There are fruits: grapes, pomegranate and papaya. And there are bananas. The English language has no words for this variety. One can say yellow banana, green banana, fat green banana, red banana, short yellow banana, thin long green banana, and so on. But the variety is really too large for the language to capture. I wonder whether Tamil has the words to capture the variety on display here (as a comment to this post informs me).

Brushing up on Dzongkha

A week from now I’ll be in West Sikkim. Time to brush up on my Dzongkha. All I remember from my trips to Bhutan are three phrases: kuzu zangpo for welcome, kadrin chhe for thank you, and tashi delek for good luck. Tibetan also has the phrase tashi delek with more or less the same meaning. Fortunately, the omniscient Google pointed me to a Dzongkha phrasebook.

Why is Chinese so hard to learn?

I more or less finished a one semester course on elementary spoken Chinese and another which taught me how to write about 50 characters, and build words with them. Now that the end of the course is about two months in the past, I realize that I’m back where I started: I can barely read and write Chinese. Last week I tried to say a few words to a couple of Chinese friends and failed miserably in communicating with them. Almost everything I memorized has disappeared.

So I was happy to read what I understand is a famous article: Why Chinese is so damn hard. If you are struggling with Chinese, it is good to read this article.

Utterly lost in translation

Lost it? Need to find it again? Just follow the sign.

This is a sign from the burial mound of the first emperor (Qin Shih Huang) in Xi’an. The Chinese characters in this sign read minzu jiliang. Minzu is accurately translated as national. Jiliang could be translated as either back or spine. So, the translation is rather accurate. But what does it mean?

I asked a linguist. His explanation turned out to provide an interesting insight into modern Chinese culture.

Fossils in language

I’m familiar with words for relations within the large extended Indian families, the single word that expresses whether your grandmother is from your father’s or mother’s side, the clear difference between your father’s elder or younger brother, the lack of such a differentiation for his female siblings, the lack of differentiation between an older sibling and cousin of the same sex, and so on. When we got married, and The Family and I slowly learned these words in another Indian language, we also found the interesting occasional differences. For us these relations are living and important, they affect our social ties.

When I started learning Chinese I was not surprised that there is an equal variety of words for elder and younger sisters and brothers, for uncles and aunts, based on the order of their births, for grandparents. But in China these are linguistic fossils. For two generations there have been no siblings. A lost taxi driver in Wuhan will call out Meimei (meaning younger sister) to a passing woman to stop and ask for directions, in startling contrast to one in Kolkata who will call out Didi (meaning older sister). But these are synthetic uses. Very few in China have siblings: gege, didi, meimei, jiejie, or uncles and aunts: bobo, jiujiu, guzhang, gugu, yima, or cousins. On the other hand, walking in a park you will keep hearing the words yeye, gonggong, nainai, laolao as children call out to their grandparents. Changing the structure of families is a genuine cultural revolution, a complete break with China’s own past. But language is tenacious, the fossils of these relations remain.