Hola!

The Nepali word hola is an awesome word. Here is why it is great.

1) When written with Roman characters it joins the fairly significant set of Nepali words that appear to have either been inspired by or directly stolen from the Spanish language. Prominent members in this set include the words asi (eighty), hijo (yesterday), and pahilo (first).

2) Its closest English equivalent is 'maybe.' In both Nepali and English this word is incredibly useful in social situations. It is used very often in Nepali. In a culture where direct refusals are always impolite, you can give noncommittal responses to invitations ("I will be able to give teacher workshops once a week for the next two months maybe"), or you can soften assertions ("Translating every word I say into Nepali while I'm teaching in English does not the help the students maybe").

3) It can also be added to a command to make it more polite. If you translate hola as 'maybe' in this case, it makes stern commands sound hilariously mild-mannered. For example, when I visited Patan Hospital in 2008 I saw this written near the ER in bold, commanding letters:

सोबाइल साइलेन्ट मोडमा रखिदिनु होला


(Set your cell phones on 'Silent Mode' maybe)


4) I discovered at the LSA Conference that hola is actually the verb 'to be' in what is called the probabilitive case. This is the same case that is used in the Nepali phrase for 'goodbye,' Pheri Bhetaúla, which means something like 'Until we meet again,' or 'Let us meet again maybe.'

Stopping My Two Words

Last week was the Nepali New Year: B.S. 2068. The schools reopened last week after a monthlong break. The books will arrive sometime this month, and there is still no class schedule. Every day new students come in to the office with their parents to be registered. About half the students are in a classroom during any given class period, and they often have to sit in the classroom unattended because the teachers are busy with meetings and data surveys.

I've been in the classroom with my counterpart a lot, though, frantically trying to complete a pen-pal project before the American schools close. When my mother came she brought with her thirty letters from public school students in Austin, Texas. I am teaching letter writing, and soon I will split the students into groups and have them respond to each letter. As usual, the biggest difficulty I find is in encouraging creative production; students are not used to coming up with their own ideas. They expect the teacher to give them the basic information and format of the letter. I do see some innovation, though, and it makes my day whenever a student adds their own words or experiments with a new phrase.

You can learn about Nepali language and letter-writing conventions by seeing how Nepali students write letters in English. Here's a typical example:


"Dear Friend,

I am fine here, I think you are also fine there. I am X. I read in 7 class. My school name is Shree Udaya Kharka Secondary School in Nepal. Nepal is very beautiful. Now I will stop my two words.

Your Friend,

X"


- That first bit: "I am fine here, I think you are also fine there." That is a direct translation of a Nepali phrase that is commonly used at the beginning of letters. The Nepali version contains the additional word hola, which is somewhat similar to the English word 'maybe' and gives the connotation "I am well, and I hope you are well also."

- Using "I read" for "I study," "7 class" for "grade 7," and "My school name" for "My school's name" are all examples of mistakes that arise from direct translations of Nepali vocabulary and grammar. In Nepali the common word for "to study" is the same as "to read." The other two examples reflect Nepali grammar and word order.

- "Now I will stop my two words" is another literal rendering of an idiom. It makes my counterpart smile when he reads it because it is an idiom commonly used by Nepali politicians when they finish their longwinded speeches. As you might guess, it means something like "Now I've given you my two cents."

This is a good illustration to students of some of the difficulties that crop up when you begin learning a language and discover that the differences between languages go beyond vocabulary and syntax. 

Bus Drivers are a Lonely Bunch

Picture taken by a fellow ETA. The Devanagari above is a very common expression (on buses): Aamaa Bubaako Aashirbad - "Mother and Father's Blessing"

Other lovelorn expressions I have seen written on Kathmandu buses:

"LOVE POIJAN"

"DON'T BRECK MY HEART"

"LIFE IS TOO SHORT FOR LOVE"

Granted, this can be a welcome change from the saccharine schlock of the ever-present Bollywood love anthems. On the back tailgate of buses you often see two (sometimes three or four) English words printed. This is usually traffic advice to other motorists. This advice can seem confusing from an American perspective, but once you comprehend how buses operate here they become comprehensible. Some of the most common messages:

"40 KM"

"SPEED CONTROL"

"HORN PLEASE"

"SEE YOU"

"DRIVE SLOW LONG LIFE"

What I'm getting at here is that I think that if local bus drivers were to drive a bit faster and take fewer and shorter breaks such that the 300 KM flat highway stretch from Butwal to Kathmandu takes less than 15 hours (15 hours? Really? 2 pm to 5am?), I think they would have a bit more time to spend with their girlfriends and they wouldn't be so mopey all the time.   

Nenglish in Print

I haven't heard Nenglish very often in Nepal. When I was staying with friends in India I was fascinated by the constant code-switching between Hindi and English. I had seen that in Bollywood movies but I didn't think people actually spoke Henglish all the time, that their main language of discourse was actually a mix between two languages.

In Nepal I have heard it only a few times on the buses, usually among private school students. On the news I have heard some Nepali politicians switching back and forth, and everyone else seems to use a whole lot of English loan words, but usually there seems to be a heavy favoring of one language over the other.

There is a blogger whose articles occasionally appear in the English-language Nepali Times whose writing style mimics English conversation with Nepali pronunciation and heavy Nepali loan words and phrases. Here's one of his blog posts - Sick City. It is pretty difficult to understand if you don't know Nepali and are not up on the current events.

Some things that I thought were interesting:

- Nepali pronunciation of English words like "tyam" for time, "feelim" for film, "estyle" for style.

- The reduplication I mentioned in this blog post that is used frequently in conversational Nepali: "...them Tibetans protest srotest...", "... how to play them football sootball...", "... asking them bideshis for help selp"

- Nepali particles like "kyah," "hola ni," "rey."

- Overusing the word "them": I've never heard Nepali English speakers talk that way, but it's definitely in imitation of how some Nepalis speak English.  

Language Development Center

"We work with minority language speakers enabling them to become literate first in their own language, then in other languages. Basic literacy skills are a critical component for people to access useful information and engage effectively with the wider community. We partner with local, national and international organizations in our work."

People learn to read and write more effectively when they first develop these skills in their own language. Mother language education is a good idea not only because it helps to protect languages that may soon be threatened and in danger of extinction, but also because it simply works better. The majority viewpoint in Nepal is that English is the only effective medium of education. I worry that this denigrates Nepali and minority languages in people's minds, reduces the quality of education, will further the disappearance of unique and beautiful minority languages, and creates an inferiority complex in people's perceptions of their own nation and community.

This organization is currently participating in a month-long competition to be included on the website GlobalGiving.org. They are trying to raise $4,000 from 50 donors by April 31st after which they will have secured a permanent spot on the website. If you are so inclined, please take a look and consider throwing them a few shekels:

Literacy and Livelihoods for 445 Women in Nepal

I intend to begin volunteering at the LDC during the weekends once school starts up again after the New Year (the Nepali New Year starts after April 15th). I feel that this will create a good balance in my activities here, because I am teaching English at what is becoming an English medium school. While I believe that English proficiency is a vital part of Nepali education and I am very happy to be helping with that, I support Mother Language Education as the most effective means of instruction in Nepali schools.

Saarkyo!

The other night I was eating daalbhaat and some of the rice went down the wrong pipe. It ended up somewhere in my nasal cavity, and I was having some difficulty explaining, in Nepali and in a suitably tactful and tasteful sort of way, the reason for all the strange noises that I had suddenly begun emitting. Eventually a grain of rice ejected from my nose with such force that it stung my hand. In the eyes of all who were privileged enough to witness the end of this spectacle I saw relief mixed with mild amounts of amusement, revulsion, and pity.

Later on I was told that I could have explained everything that was happening to me with one Nepali word: saarkinu. They asked me what English word is used when food gets stuck in your nose, and I said that I didn't think there was a single word for it. My didi theorized that there is no word for this in English because Americans do not eat as much rice as Nepalis.

I guess you could say that this is a version of the "No Word for X" trope, which is any sort of claim that a language does not have a specific word for something, and that this says something about the culture or the imaginative capabilities of the speakers of that language. Like when Reagan said that he had heard "Russian has no word for 'freedom'" or when people look at Italian business scandals and claim that "Italian has no word for 'Accountability.'"

This is a little different, because it refers to eating culturally specific foods. It makes sense that there's no English word for daalbhaat, because it is a Nepali dish, and if it were to become popular in the US we would probably coin a Nepali loanword, like we did with samosas and chicken tandoori. It's possible that we Americans tend to eat foods that are less uniquely suited to fit through our nasal cavity, but the phenomenon is far from unheard of (I can personally attest to the nasal/aeronautic possibilities of corn, carrots, beans, barbeque, and of course several carbonated and noncarbonated liquids - I wonder if I should be paying more attention while I'm eating). It is just a cool quirk of the Nepali language that there is a word for it while there isn't in English. These sorts of observations rarely say anything relevant about the culture.

The interesting thing for me is that this trope is usually used to generalize the cultural practices of an exotic culture, and here the tables are turned and it is used to describe my own culture. 

Return to Tangting

Back when I was in Nepal with Pitzer College I stayed for two weeks in Tangting, a small Gurung village in the Annapurna Range. When my mother came to visit close to the time of a yearly festival there, I decided to go back there with some old friends from Pitzer and Tangting and some newer friends from Fulbright.

We traveled with several Tangting residents who were students in Pokhara coming home for the festival

The bridge I crossed back in 2008 was out of order

The replacement bridge did not fill me with confidence

These are hives of cliff bees about a hundred feet up the side of a cliff.

There had been a massive landslide on the other side of the valley that swept off a large chunk of the hill and pooled the river into a lake. Sadly, five people were buried. To get an idea of size, enlarge this picture and see if you find the four hikers making their way across the middle of the upturned earth.

Here are the four hikers taken with a zoom lens.

A parade greeted us because we were traveling with Hailey, who was being honored for her contributions to a new community center.

Opening of the Community Center

Tangting

King Pratap Malla's Mysterious Inscription, Cont.

Way back in October I mentioned the multilingual inscription on Hanuman Dhoka that dates from the reign of King Pratap Malla in the 17th century. A friend of mine pointed me to this recent article from My Republica:

Lost in Translation

"... English, French, Persian, Arabic, Maithili, Kiranti, Newari, Kayathinagar (script of the then west Nepal), Devanagri, Gaudiya, Kashmiri (Punjabi script family), Sanskrit and two different types of Tibetan scripts have been inscribed on the slab... 


Though all the languages are yet to be deciphered and the entire meaning is yet to be interpreted, Gautam Bajra has decrypted bits and pieces of it in his book. And the starting line offers invocation to Goddess Kali...
 
Rajbhansi, who also served as a script expert at the Department of Archeology for 10 years, informs that till date they have not been able to decipher the Persian script. He believes that the inscriptions don’t carry particular meanings. Apart from it, he says that the English script – AVIOM and NEWINTERLHIVER – don’t make any sense at all. 'King Pratap Malla was a man of high regards, well-versed in fine arts. And as he was a poet, he was decorated with several credentials. So, perhaps to boast of his achievements and mastery of different scripts, he installed the engravings.'”


King Pratap Malla keeps popping up in interesting stories I hear about Kathmandu. He's the guy that built the bullet-shaped shrines Pratappur and Anantapur next to the main stupa at Swoyambhu to help him win a victory over Tibet. Pratappur was hit by lightning in February.

“This is the first ever instance of lightning striking a world heritage site,” Suresh Suras Shrestha, a section officer at the department of world heritage sites under the DoA said. source

Shantipur is also in the Swoyambhu complex. In the tunnels below this temple a 1500-year-old holy man is said to exist in a state of immortal meditation. The last man to see him was King Pratap Malla, who ventured down there in 1658, braving bats and snakes and hungry ghosts, to seek his advice in ending a drought that was ravaging the valley.

At the barred entrance to Shantipur Temple, a monkey wistfully gazes inside and contemplates the secrets within.