Posts tagged nepal

When I’m in Kathmandu I pass this sign nearly every day when I want to make a foray into the tourist wonderland that is Thamel:

I had been doing so for over six months until Andrew came for a visit and sniggered every time we walked past this sign. Perhaps you’ve already had a snigger too?

See, what I didn’t know, and what the people of Nepal clearly don’t know, is that in some online communities ‘cyber’ is short for ‘cyber sex’ - and so every time Andrew saw this sign and the many like it he found it to be hilarious and inappropriate. It certainly brings a new sense to my favourite internet cafe ‘Meeting Point Cyber.’

One of the things I’m focusing on in my research is how you report the speech of other people. The classic way of doing this in English is to use the verb ‘she/you/etc. said.’ There are other ways to do it in English (‘she was like…’ or ‘and then she went’) but Yolmo and Nepali have a much more convenient way of going about it.

Both languages use a small particle at the end of a sentence when they want to indicate that someone else said it. In Yolmo that particle is lo and in Nepali it’s re. When you get into the nitty gritty of how they work these two are slightly different but they work much the same to indicate what you say isn’t your own words.

For example, if you asked what time our friend is meeting us for dinner I could just reply with:

‘seven o’clock lo’

It’s a useful particle for gossip:

‘she doesn’t like him anymore re’

means that it’s not you saying it, it’s the other person’s words.

This is, in a very general sense, part of an evidential system in that it is a way of grammatically expressing how you know what you know. When in Nepal I find it a rather useful little feature of every day conversation.

One of the most fascinating things about the spread of English as a global language is the way each place develops its own quirky take on the language. I’ve now lived in Nepal for long enough to not be alarmed by restaurants touting ‘hygienic food,’ to know that the 14 hours a day we’re currently without electricity is ‘load shedding’ and to know that when people offer you a ‘plastic’ they’re just giving you a bag to put your shopping in.

But there’s a new phenomenon that has found its way into Kathmandu in my 11 month absence:



This is one of about four such ‘lounges’ that I’ve noticed since returning, none of which were there a year ago. Indeed, this one is where the Bakery Cafe used to be, with its terrible food and awesome deaf staff.

An ATM lounge is a facility where one can walk into a room and have the option of multiple ATMS. Most interestingly they are all offered by different banking institutions - easily done with the plethora of small banking concerns here. There are no chairs, and there is no lounging area at all - just a bank of bank machines.

Such facilities show the growing interest Nepalis have in economic development - but the name is such a striking and innovative use of ‘lounge’ that I find it fascinating. Is this just an isolated quirk of English or have you come across it before? 

On the weekend I’ll be heading back to Nepal for a couple of months as the final field work visit for my PhD project. I’ll still be blogging, but there will undoubtedly be a bit more of a Nepal influence to the posts. I’m hoping that I can base some of the TwwEh posts around some of the interesting grammatical features I often encounter while I’m over there.

There are two languages which are the main sources of my linguistic knowledge in Nepal. They’ve already had a fair bit of influence over what I’ve already written for TwwEh posts, as you’ll see below.

Nepali is the national language of Nepal, and the language that I use to get by in day to date life. It’s an Indo-Aryan language, so it’s closely related to Hindi, and it’s part of the bigger Indo-European family so at a distance it’s related to English way way back before documented history. Nepali has retroflex consonants, Ergativity (but only i the past tense), a distinction between second person plural and singular, and a word for the day after tomorrow.

Yolmo is the language I’m working with for my PhD, and more specifically I’m working with speakers of the Lamjung dialect. It’s a Tibeto-Burman language, closely related to Tibetan and Sherpa, but also to many languages of Nepal, India, Bhutan, Burma, Bangladesh and all the way down through south China and Laos. Yolmo has many of the features above, and more. The sound system has retroflex consontants, as well as many words that start with ng-. The ergative system is much harder to analyse than Nepali, and it has a base-20 as well as a base-10 counting system and evidentiality. Yolmo not only has a distinction between second person plural and singular but it also has dual forms as well as plural, and an inclusive/exclusive first person plural distinction.

Hopefully over the next two months I’ll be able to share a lot more interesting features of these languages!