“I didn’t want to live in a world where I’d shrug and say yom asset yom bassal and no one would know I meant one day honey, one day onions. I didn’t want to cook and never be told ashteedek (long live your hands). I wanted to be able to ask, ash lonek (how are you? - but literally, joyfully what colour are you?) I don’t believe that flattening us all down into sameness is the way to keep the world beautiful or even alive.”
Samantha Ellis from Chopping Onions on My Heart.
I too as someone who loves to cook would adore being told “long live your hands” but that music will never play in my ears. And I’m orange by the way.
The language above is Judeo-Iraqi Arabic but the beautiful imagery of of the literal translations reminded me of the many times I have discussed idiomatic expressions with speakers of other languages. The conversation takes a turn where each individual tries to find an expression in their native language that the other languages don’t have an equivalent for. Invariably they do not find one but the same ideas are expressed so very differently.
The first such conversation was with Xiang Xia in Dali China, back in the 1990s. We started with the expression fair weather friends, which she had read in a novel and couldn’t fathom, as I recall. Since I was also learning Chinese at the time, I then demanded to know the Chinese equivalent. 酒肉朋友, (jiǔròu-péngyou) which is literally wine and meat friends. From this point we discovered so many more and marveled at how often the references drew on different associations in the English and Chinese versions. Associations and symbolism drifted between the weather, hospitality, sports, history and traditions. Rhyming patterns and rhythm were also variants. We never drew any conclusions or published.
Years later in a bookstore in Hiroshima I found an illustrated book about Japanese idioms, in which each idiom was presented with its English counterpart on the opposite page. Of course I had to buy it though, I have no idea where my copy would be now. Possibly at the Oxfam Secondhand Bookstore in Adelaide, but I doubt that.
They ended up receiving over ten cartons of our books when we decided that we weren’t adding them, to an all too recently acquired storage unit in preparation for our departure to teach in Thailand.
Recently I spotted a Khmer-English version of this kind of publication and thought to buy it for a friend, with the language skills to appreciate it but I resisted the urge. Possessions can often become burdens especially when you are leaving. Oops I digress.
Another linguistic quirk of Japan I observed while living there is the assumption about the origins of foreign words embedded in their language. One of the three alphabets that are all used concurrently, consists of only foreign words. In a Japanese person’s mind that often equates to English. For that exact reason people would say certain single words to us slowly and clearly expecting us to understand. The origin of those words may have been French, Portuguese or German but the expectation was it was English because so many of them are. Often we did not comprehend their meaning but I developed an interest in discovering which language the word had come from.
Similar language fascinations seem to pop up everywhere.
Having just started writing this we slipped out to post some snail mail- yep that’s another interest of mine: returning to hand written, personalized, slow communication. The wait, expectation and revelation being lost in digital versions. I’ve been on that bandwagon for some time. But yet again I digress.
We happened upon an exhibition entitled “Of Words.” Though it proved somewhat tedious translating the narrative to English via a digital app, as all the information was presented in Khmer and French only, the irony was not lost on me. Here I was relying on the very technology I so often malign. One of the many fascinating facts that came to light was that almost all the loan words in the Khmer language are French in origin and there was resistance to this trend, when they first fell into common usage. The succinct French version almost always prevailed over the more long winded Khmer creations which relied heavily on descriptions. Stands to reason really, having historically been a protectorate and so many Khmer being able to communicate in French already that that would be the language source and efficiency would prevail, I suppose.
The book quoted above introduced so many new linguistic concepts and vocabulary to me, that I feel I must at least comment on the vocabulary I’d never encountered before. These words were nevertheless totally self explanatory upon reflection. It obviously appealed to the word nerd in me so I thought I’d conclude with a few examples.
What children hear is not necessarily the language they first speak, especially if it is not the one, in which they engage with the exterior world. If a language different from their parents’ native one prevails and is used at home by children and parents together, the one their parents speak to each other is only the parents’ mother tongue not their children’s. The term mother tongue then in fact becomes confusing. The children absorb and speak only fragments of that language but understand so much more. Milk language is the more accurate term applied to the child’s use of the parental language. Fascinating to me at least.
There is also grief attached to knowing that that language is becoming extinct and you may never hear it spoken again, even if you speak only a broken form of it yourself. Many migrants, displaced people and refugees have this experience. This concept was at the heart of the book.
Predator languages was also new to me. This brutal term includes English, Arabic, Russian and Hebrew and doubtless many more. These languages take over and native languages are lost. Historically certain ethic groups have been prevented from freely speaking their mother tongues or even punished for doing so and furthermore, for those who speak only those ethnic languages or for whom they are their native language, higher education and countless other social and economic opportunities are lost or even deliberately denied, in order to enslave them in some regimes. Bully languages is a term which carries the very same meaning and has much more impact in my mind.
Globally thousands of languages have already become extinct.
Very many, developed, English speaking nations, in addition to Israel, China and Russia (and without a doubt many others I am unaware of) stand accused of repeatedly and persistently suppressing minority languages in this way and this is referred to as lingucide. However, who is actually paying attention to these brutal and alienating practices? It bothers me how complacent we have become as societies and how we are becoming ever more homogeneous.
These are lived experiences for millions of First Nation and ethic minorities globally and identity is intimately tied to language. Native Americans, indigenous Australians, Tibetans and Uighurs and countless Middle Eastern ethnic groups are among them. First nations people are a disproportionally large group who have suffered this loss of language.
