Linguistically biased?

PS: This blog is a reflection from the same situation I've been faced at many stages when I meet new people. Nothing happened recently to prompt it.

Have you ever been faced with this situation? You're in a group of Indians predominantly speaking one regional language. And it happens to be your Mother tongue too. Yet, there are some people who assume you don't speak it well. While I've found that preposterous and ultra-presuming each time, I thought I should dig a little deeper to see what makes these people assume such things. And conclusively it was one of two things -

1. My English is so well-developed that they've assumed that I speak English with everyone around and just a smattering of the regional language, to my family included. Loosely translated: Pure BS. I mean, just because I am one "Mary" (English speaking Tamil woman - read "Peter's" female equivalent), doesn't mean I can't speak  great Tamil. Come on!

2. Dialect: Being from a TamBrahm family means that my Tamil has remained sheltered in spite of all the Chennai glory years probably because most of my closest friends are TamBrahm as well. So sure, we have a lot of specific lingo which the others probably don't understand sometimes but hey, it's a two way street . And even if it does sound different, you don't hear me mocking your poyirchu to my poyiduthu , both essentially meaning "it has gone" or use the age-old wise-crack of naan kolathuku poren (I'm going to the pond) while I ask "aathuku polama?" (Brahmin lingo for "shall we go home". Basically aar(th)u also means river in Tamil). And speaking a different dialect doesn't preclude me from understanding others. And just 'coz my vocabulary in galeej words may not match some others', it needn't lead to the conclusion that my Tamil isn't proper. 

 

I'd love to extrapolate that logic to English and see how many people actually know English. Now wouldn't that be fun... throw in the word play and we'll have a riot. Nakkal? Not really.

On the other hand, out of the blue, time's freakin' flying, don't you think?  It's the end of May!

"Bi"-lingual

For many people learning French for the first time, it may seem absurd that French words have a specific gender. Of course this is nothing new to people familiar with our very own Hindi. Like mera bag(my bag where bag's male) or meri kursi(my chair where chair is female). Interestingly, taking the very same examples to French yields the same gender. It's mon sac and ma chaise respectively male and female for the corresponding examples of bags and chairs. Most words match for the two languages as far as I checked, except some, like "telephone", which is male in French and female in Hindi. Which makes it "bi-lingual" in more than one sense, if you get my drift. The funny part's when the ignorant English speaker attempts French or vice versa. Often times the gender is messed up.. Perhaps it's not so weird when the English speaker says mon chaise for his chair even though the chair is female. But it's funnier when the French are trying to explain something to you in English. Like when the computer hangs, for example. English, being gender-neutral, we tend to say, It's not responding. When the French people translate it for you, they often say, He is not responding. Ok, I don't know why, but I thought this was funny when I started writing this post. Now it seems a little rhetoric. Ah well, it's something interesting, if not funny at least for a few lingual enthusiasts. For everyone else, Happy middle-of-the-week and hope I think up something more fun next time around! A+

Read my mind

I figure everyone thinks in a different language, a language that may not be your thai-mozhi (mother tongue). I know I do. I think in English... Even when I pray to God or am mentally hoping for something, it's all in English. I think I saw it in Dasavatharam, where one of Kamal Hassan's dialogues says that he thinks in English. I totally identify with that. But that does not affect the delivery or the continuum of my speech or writing in any of the other languages that I am fluent in... But it does play a big role in French. Maybe part of the reason is that the sentence formations in the two languages are very similar. And do I find that I form a sentence completely in English and translate it word for word to French. And I realized that just today when I had a conversation in excess of 5 exchanges each with a colleague. I think for like a second before responding to the question. And in that second, there is a substitution process going on in my head. I don't know if I'll ever fluently think in French. It's unlikely. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I am learning a new language after eons and I never really paid any attention to techniques when learning the other languages as a kid. And now I know that's why some other people's English sounds funny. They are translating it from their own languages... I bet that's what my French is to them as well. Funny. So what language do you think in?

J'apprends le français

How long is it since you learned a language? For most of us, the languages we know were the ones we learned way back in primary school. So if you're like me, you won't even remember how it felt to learn a language. The grammar, the prose, the verbs, the sentence constructions etc are sooo trivial that we don't even notice the way we use it. If you know Hindi, you'd realize like many foreign languages, even our good own Hindi has "gender" for things. Aam ka ped, neend ki goli - ok you get it. Its sooo imbibed in us, we dont realize that its monumental for someone who doesn't know the language.

So, I started learning French out of pure boredom by myself a couple of weeks ago before the brainwave that I could actually "sit through" a French 101 course at school struck me. However I kept at the self-learning and built a cute little vocabulary. Ofcourse anyone who knows French knows that NOTHING is pronounced the way its written or vice versa. The only saving grace is that the sentence construction is pretty similar to English and once you build your vocab collection of verbs, you will be failr good with practice. Ofcourse learning the language and practicing in front of your computer is one thing and speaking it with a native is a whole another thing.

Today was the first French 101 class. The instructor was a Frenchman, a PhD student was a sweet guy who spoke English with the easiest-to-distinguish French accent (sorry to disappoint you - he was NOT cute looking!) And so after a couple of sentences from him, we were all to introduce ourselves in French (if we knew it) or atleast try. When my turn came, I took a deep breath and started out "Je m'apelle Jaya" and so on. And to my own surprise I did fairly well. Except that though I knew my age in French, I was shy to pronounce it! Overall it was a good first class. It gave me that flutter which I hadn't felt in sooo long.. The feeling of knowing absolutely NOTHING while you sit in the first class. That too its a romance language... how bad can it be? With no crediting to worry about, this one should be a breeze. In all my excitement, I bought my first textbook in the US for this class!

On the "downside", I donno how long I expect to stick around here to do justice to this class.. But for what its worth, from the "Je ne comprends pas", its slowly becoming "Je comprends" :-)

Until later, Au revoir!