A tipster on the News page alerts us to the following very odd column by Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle. The tipster comments: “Personally I think this article is in poor taste, but I’ll let others decide for themselves. I don’t want to be accused of jingoism.” A wise display of circumspection! So let’s take a look for ourselves. Carroll begins:
Occasionally over the years I have reprinted examples of English written by people for whom English is not their native language. Many of the examples appeared to be translations prepared by somebody with a whatever-to-English dictionary and a keen will to succeed. The earnest author would often, perhaps unknowingly, have a fit of fancy, often landing in magical territory unvisited by native speakers.
Okay… So, where are we going with this?
People often accused me of making fun of the writers. Not at all. I loved the writers. They were demonstrating how flexible English can be, something that professional writers tend to forget. It’s nice that the grammar police exist, but they mustn’t be allowed to rule. Language is not just a tool or a blade; sometimes it’s a springboard or a trampoline or a balloon.
Tool, blade; springboard, trampoline, balloon. Right. Anyway:
English as spoken in India is not a mistranslation; it’s a different dialect. Most written Indian English is made for domestic consumption, so it can follow rules that make intuitive sense to the audience.
Ah! We’re going to make fun of Indian English! Sure, why not.
The work below was prepared by a friend of a friend.
The old friend-of-friend move. Convenient when you write a daily column. (No columnist should ever write daily.)
All the sentences are reported to be actual quotations from one issue of True Crimes magazine
Reported to be actual! (Columnists don’t have to fact check either.) Now, onto this Indian English of which you speak:
Her husband clipped her ambitions with the instrument of refusal. The pangs of separation from her paramour made her to suffer….
When he retired to his bed that night, he tried to analyze latent import of her expressions; his body got thrilled….
Vijay’s friends had cars, in which stereos were fitted and they used to insert cassettes in the decks and then enjoy melody of recorded songs. “Come, let us go to the lake and listen to melodies of songs there….”
Geeta smelt a revolting odour in what he spoke. But Vijay was influential and also commanded much muscle power. Although he was in love with another girl called Lucy, a modern and highly fashionable dame, love messages were started exchanging through visual contact. Geeta put a bewitching and killing smile on her lips. Vijay didn’t find her unsuitable for an immoral act. “My business pertains to counterfeit currency and alongside I also do swindling. I will indulge in such novel acts of sex that your spirits will blossom and cheer you up and you will not feel sorry….”
Geeta: “Would I prepare for celebration?”
And so on. Anyway, here’s my question: as odd as Indian English can get, is this at all representative? Maybe I’ve just been sheltered from the worst of it. If so, feel free to rupture my illusions, preferably supplying your favorite examples. But if not, what exactly was the purpose of this column?
In re. your article on the 20th inst. I find it aggravating that you should not bear in mind the other type of Indian English, viz. the species that is afflicted by a epistolatory style that was more in vogue circa the 19th century. I expect comments of the above nature to be forthcoming, inasmuch as many among us know many others who continue to communicate in such outmoded fashion – esp. in their missives. Many of those were educated well in St.Xav, St. Ed, Fr. Wm. High and other such saintly institutions of grammatical edification that fortunately remained untainted by the presence of journals such as the ones that you make mention of. Thence, these students, armed with their superiour education have climbed to the very heights of the civil services, in the business professions and other positions of influence by dint of their dilligence and lucubration. One may venture, nay hope, that in the fullness of time, these able professional men of sound faculties will be able to expunge such publications from Society.
Your most obediently, DDiG Esq. BS MS ABD
hehe brown_fob, I have heard this complaint once.
\”But Science-Ma\’am, PT-Sir told us to extinguish the tubelight since the electric-meter for the school will go up fastly and then we will have to be increasing our school-fees. We tried telling him that we will burn the tubelight for the late afternoon only in the winters only when it is becoming dark outside. Also we are not rotating the fan in the winters, no? So that is saving the electric too, no?\”
When my entire family gets together, my aunt calls us the “whole jing-bang.”
And I agree with whoever said, “I don’t understand the point of the original article.”
One of the many dead-end jobs I held in my first few years of immigrant hell in America was that of a restaurant worker in a very expensive Indian restaurant, a Gaylord, in fact. American patrons would often aske us what the names of certain dishes meant in English, and we were happy to oblige. One day a pretty white lady asked a waiter what rasgullah meant. He said, with a completely straight face, “Ras means juice, gullah means balls. So rasgullahs means juicy balls.”
The lady loved it! What a great country!
Hee hee, awesome, I have an aunt who says “the whole jingle bangle”!
Maybe “jing bang” is short for “jingle bangle?” I must call my aunt…
8-o … Somebody needs this for diwali.
btw- there’s a discussion on the subject same as pointed by Seeker #4, but discussed not so muchly – so i beg to bring to your attention down here below/ some excerpts for your kind consumption …
Fascinating stuff… there’s more there if you’d care to over gander
more affectionate dialogs between my fob wife and my boorishly American self:
wife: why do you make me shop at the clearance section always? me: because i’m a broke-ass-nigga wife: mean-o! kuthard! cheapskate! me: it’s not like i make you shop there. Besides [my sights locked onto her new Burberry wristwatch] THAT certainly wasn’t found at the “clearance” rack. grumble wife: i swear i’ll BLOW YOU UP! me: how about just a “BLOW YOU”? we’ll leave the “UP” part for another time, no? wife: hut! nalayak! out of my way [storming towards the dressing room with a stash of clothes]
Neha:
I started to learn Hindi from my dad’s ‘Learn Hindi in 30 days’ book at the same time I was taking French in High School because I wanted to know what Madhuri was saying to Salman. Qui, Kya, Que, Kaisa, Quoi, Quelle, Kaun, Quand, Kiska, Qu’est-ce que, etc totally confused the hell out of me and I had to keep away from Hindi. Did anyone else have this problem?
Uff, learning hindi and french at the same time, gotta hand it to you, girl. well done. i learnt hindi (and gujarati) much before i attempted french. i found that it helped me quite a bit when categorizing nouns as masculine/feminine in french bec. the system exists in hindi as well. my teacher spoke french horribly, it was more like Frindi, so i never really figured out how to produce speech correctly 🙂
AC,
you’re my hero
No, I say the British are the only people pronouncing English properly. It’s their language, they get final say over the proper pronunciation just like Spain gets authority on the pronunciation of Spanish over Mexico, Portual gets Portugese over Brazil, France gets French over African countries, India gets Hindi over anyone else, and Britain gets English over USA, Australia, and certainly India.
Siddartha, the quoted passage reads like a crappy Bollywood subtitling job, with all the overly flowery language, etc. 😉
While I understand the sentiment, I don’t think that a language belongs to anyone group of people. I feel that kind of thinking just creates another barrier that keeps people from understanding one another. And if the Brits want to gripe about the world speaking their language incorrectly, they should have thought about it before trying to take over and subjugate the whole planet. It’s a problem that they created.
Neha, if you are still having trouble pronouncing French words with the proper accent, here are two tips that would have saved me much heartache if someone had told them to me when I first learned, or rather, learnt, ;), French. When you are trying to pronounce the “r” sound, make your throat do the same thing it does when you are gargling water. For the “ou” sound, put your lips in the shape of an “o”, but say the letter “e”. Let me know if it works.
You cant take the culture out of a language and you cant take a language out of a culture.
Wow, I created a cliche!!
That’s not how language works, sa. “Proper pronunciation” is an ever evolving thing, and the lines between “language,” “dialect,” and “patois” are not at all firmly drawn. Something is always on its way to becoming something else.
If one were to hew to your theory, sa, Italians would be dictating to Romanians, Spaniards and the French how to speak the language (which, after all, is only a Latin vernacular); the French would have to get together with the Germans to decide how “English” should be spoken; and Bengali and Hindi would both be dismissed as nothing more than mispronounced Sanskrit.
Linguistics, in other words, should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. There is such a thing as Indian English, and it’s a beautiful thing. And there is such a thing as American English, and it’s a beautiful thing, too.
Long Island English, on the other hand….. (kidding!!)
Well, yes. At least this reasoning is grounded somewhere, there are some roots to find the objective pronunciation and definition. Also, I note that Italian is actually a different language than French even with the Latin roots. American English is not a different language than British English so the reasoning breaks apart.
Taken to its logical extreme, if you don’t ground language in some objective criteria, then any word can be pronounced however one wants. Without some objective standard, we’re all speaking gibberish and no one will be able to communicate in even the same language.
I know the response to this is that language is an evolving creation. Of course. But wholesale abuse of a language in the form of mispronunciation and wrong meanings is not evolution and development, at least it shouldn’t be.
.
Yo, life is too short to spend converting prescriptivists. To each her own.
If you enjoy interesting articles about linguistics that are shy of academic prose, I’d also recommend Language Log, a blog run out of Penn that I read from time to time.
It shouldn’t be, but it is. Also, who decides what is abuse? The French have L’Academie Francaise but does that make the version of French spoken by a person in Senegal any less valid? Likewise, many, including myself to some extent, don’t appreciate the mainstream acceptance of ebonics, but the very nature of American English has changed as a result. Is it still “abuse” if the language itself is changed and conforms to influences from those who have not been properly schooled in the language? Even the Oxford Dictionary has a central goal of documenting the evolution of the English language.
You iz right. We should not spend any tyme jivin’ about da past an’ future o’ language. Why try an’ change someone who likes werdz an’ grammer ta be correct? Let’s just keep evolving our language into whatever we’s wants it ta be an’ screw brothas else. what the fuck sup now?
I can write “correct English” with the best of them, but no amount of huffing and puffing will keep my “correct English” from sounding peculiar and outdated two hundred and fifty years from now.
My lovingly crafted sentences will sound just as weird to future humans as Addison and Steele sound to me now. But, with any luck, it’ll be at least a fraction as delightful.
By 3006, though, it will certainly be completely incomprehensible. Our fiercely defended “correct” will be their “meaningless scribbles.”
(sigh) This whole thing is, for some reason, reminding me of The Big B in Namak Halal, walking English and talking English. I think the article is lame, however. The Chron seems to alternate between covering interesting second-gen stories (Jeff Yang’s article that cited Abhi!) and completely exoticized stories (see Manish‘s tearing of a Chron article covering new writer Shangvi).
French colleague to me when I told him I miss India: So you have a sick home?
There was this colleague who, on her resignation from the firm, sent an email saying “It was funny working with you all.”.
And then there is the great Indian imperative : DO NOT COMB!
BTW Any one eaten good udipi lately?
I am being reminded of a clever poem, written by that dear true soldier of American poetry who often used his license to bend his language into mind-bogglingly witty rhymes:
ahem hem hem
The Purist by Ogden Nash
😀
sa, British English is a rather broad umbrella. I mean, I can’t understand a word of Welsh English. Hell, I don’t know how many English people can understand Welsh. Yes, everything does seem to sound smarter in “BBC English” or “Queen’s English” but it is so much more fun to converse with people who speak in a Cockney or Yorkshire dialect 🙂
My two reactions:
My “sick from cough and cold” letters to my schoolteachers from mum and dad were of this nature.
Dude… I learnt writing like this. From Messers Wren & Martin no less. I could Wren-&-Martinize a post about Kaavya V. Or Wren-&-Martinize Opal Mehta itself. “How Opal Mehta came to be Osculated, to be Rampant and to be Self-Realized”
“Dude… I learnt writing like this”
You wrote your sickness letters from scratch? I’m very impressed 🙂 I used to copy mine from the English textbooks, they always seemed to have a ton; like one for you being sick and one for your mom being sick etc. etc.
You are all having it going on!
Anyway. I am in India right now, and my 8 year old cousin speaks English WAY better than I speak our mother tongue. Granted, it’s with an accent and occasionally funny expressions; but she speaks quickly, accurately, and can convey humor and sarcasm in English. That’s impressive to me. What the hell do I care if it’s with an accent? I’ve rarely met an Amreekan who speaks a foreign language with the same mastery that many, many immigrants have of English.
Ofcourse not! Why would you think I forged letters? From scratch that too 🙂
To sum up this discussion, an Indian might say …”we are like that only”. On the other hand, an American might say “Indians don’t know no good English”.
I am loving it.
Anyways, do you know of the cow?
The cow is a successful animal. Also he is quadrupud, and because he is female, he give milk,but will do so when he is got child.He is same like God,sacred to Hindus and useful to man.But he has got four legs together. Two are forward and two are afterwards.
His whole body can be utilised for use. More so the milk. What can it do? Various ghee, butter,cream, curd, why and the condensed milk and so forth. Also he is useful to cobbler, watermans and mankind generally.
His motion is slow only because he is of asitudinious species. Also his other motion is much useful to trees, plants as well as making flat cakes in hand and drying in the sun. Cow is the only animal that extricates his feeding after eating. Then afterwards she chew with his teeth whom are situated in the inside of the mouth. He is incessantly in the meadows in the grass.
His only attacking and defending organ is the horn, specially so when he is got child. This is done by knowing his head whereby he causes the weapons to be paralleled to the ground of the earth and instantly proceed with great velocity forwards.
He has got tails also, but not like similar animals. It has hairs on the other end of the other side. This is done to frighten away the flies which alight on his cohoa body whereupon he gives hit with it.
The palms of his feet are soft unto the touch. So the grasses head is not crushed. At night time have poses by looking down on the ground and he shouts his eyes like his relatives, the horse does not do so.
This is the cow.
Hello all. I’m Jon Carroll’s “friend of a friend” that took the quotes from the True Crimes magazine. You can see my original post on my blog here: http://www.daveadair.com/blog/2006/07/true-crimes-whom-are-you-calling-as.html
All of the sentences were taken directly from the magazine, but as I said on my blog, I searched long and hard to find the worst (and funniest) examples of what I call “mangled English.” I’ve always loved terrible English, and as an avid traveler I get to see a lot of it. But these examples weren’t at all representative of the magazine – only the worst/best examples. I’m sure I would find it funny in any other language that I speak fluently – but not surprisingly, I only speak English! And I would never criticize bad English. I just think it’s funny.
If anyone is curious, I bought that magazine in Kalimpong, near Darjeeling. And I’m writing now from Srinagar, where I’ve just arrived two days ago.
Dave
Matrimonial columns seem to insist that brides be “fair.” My daughter, only 8 at the time she happened to read India Abroad’s matrimonial, wanted to know if there were a lot of unfair people among Indians – hence the need for “fair” brides.