What a whirlwind of a week. Immediately after finishing up in Mussoorie I headed down to Benguluru (Bangalore) for a week to help out with a policy think tank I've been corresponding with.
Most of my time was spent in the office - which was wonderful in its own way* - so I didn't get to see much of the city, but what I saw I liked.
It was about 20 degrees cooler in Benguluru than Lucknow (which makes a huge difference). It was a much bigger city - more variety, more developed infrastructure. They had (true**) PUBLIC PARKS ... just look at the picture above, there is green space EVERYWHERE! The auto-rickshaws (there are no cycle-wallas) are technically suppose to use their meter - amazing!
Interesting, English is sort of the default language because Benguluru is an intersection point of several native languages (Hindi, Kannada, and Tamil). It was infinitely more easy for me to get around this city than it is in North India, where Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu mixed) is most common.
Fingers crossed, I'll have more reasons to be spending time in Benguluru in the future!
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*It is nice to feel needed
** As opposed the the pay kind we have in Lucknow. You have to pay 5 rupees to get into the public parks here, I assume to keep out squatters.
Students of linguistic anthropology would not be surprised by me claiming that language can shape our view of the world... but the impact of that process is hard to see when you're learning your first language because you have no basis for comparison.
I'll admit that when I learned the smattering of Spanish and French that I now have at my command, I didn't feel that a strong cultural clash was coming through my new found understanding ... most likely because those cultures, while different, were still Western and retained many similar underlying cultural principles.
Learning Hindi is like entering into a new and secret world.
First, you start off with an entirely new script and alphabet. Instead of your A, B, Cs you learn your Ka (क), Kha (ख), Ga's (ग) . Word order is entirely different, in your head if you translate literally you sound a bit like Yoda (Allen Ghar par hai = Allen home at is). But this isn't the stuff that shapes culture per say, just a sign of how two systems could develop differently. No, what I'm talking about starts popping up by Chapter 6 of "Teach Yourself Hindi"... these examples range from silly to more serious --- but hopefully we'll keep updating this list.
The infinite names for family relations Following up from my recent wedding post ... not only do you have about a million names for your various family members, but they are all based on reference to the husband's family - because the wife has given up her family to join the family of her husband.
There is no word for boyfriend/girlfriend Almost goes without saying in a culture of arranged marriages, but was still sort of surprising to learn. I've been told by several friends that "love marriages" as seen as synonymous with elopement and are distinctly frowned upon as being anti-social. Not hard to imagine given that it is not supposed you get to spend lots of time with your spouse (and hence really know them)until after you're married.
There is no word for "Please" b/c it is built into the language in different command forms or verb tenses/registers. Again, not so terribly surprising if you've come across informal/formal "you" forms before, but what makes Hindi interesting is how many gradients of respect are available in the language. From Rupert Snell's "Teach Yourself Hindi":
tu - indicates great intimacy and is used in addressing a close loved one or a small child
tum - is informal and casual and is used with a person expecting no formality or deference - a friend, child or servant
ap - is relatively formal; it indicates the respect one shows towards equals (and above!) and is the natural choice in conversations with all people not falling into the previous categories
A good example of this distinction comes from a story one of our American friends told us. She was hosting a birthday party for her daughter and had invited all of the neighborhood children that she plays with. The mom was trying to get the children's attention for another game, but was using the ap form for her command and she couldn't understand why none of the kids would listen to her. Then one of the other mothers issued the same call for order in the tu command and all the children quited down ---- they weren't accostumed to being addressed in any way other than as tu. Causative verb construction= Servant verb construction This is pretty advanced grammer, so I don't know all the nuances of this construction - but there is a verb tense in Hindi that recognizes the presence of servants ... it is a very construction that says "I did this thing but through the actions of someone else". Like the difference between "I put out the fire (myself - implied)" and "I put out the fire by telling so-and-so to do it." It came up in Allen's class because they were watching a movie about a King - where all of his "actions" were done through some other agent.
This is just a work in progress ... hopefully we'll have some more neat language examples for you as we progress.
Generally I find that most cell phone's predictive dictionaries have some of the most random words... but this was a first for us. Also, Allen's name makes the dictionary as well ... coincidence .....?
