lozguistics

Into India

2012-01-30T12:17:00.002+11:00

I'm in India this week for the North East Indian Linguistics Society annual conference. Having only just settled into Kathmandu life I've suddenly found myself sight-seeing in Delhi for a few days and today I'm heading to Assam where the conference is being held.

Delhi has presented no great culture shock. If anything I'm impressed that the roads are so nice, the cars so new and the weather less bitterly cold. I have found getting around rather difficult, and I keenly feel how much easier life in Nepal is because I can speak Nepali. These few days have actually been a rather pleasant reminder of just how easy I find living in Nepal compared to when I first got there.

Gastro, Bhandas, and Festivities

2012-01-25T20:28:00.002+11:00

These are the three things that, for me, take the most time away from doing any actual work here - and they've all happened in the last few days.

The festival was Sonam Losar for the Tamang community, and appears to fall in line with the Chinese New Year. This festival actually wasn't disruptive to my own plans - and it was fun to see lots of women dressed in traditional Tamang clothing.

The gastro was much more on my mind. It's never fun to have the voms - but when I only got started on work a couple of days ago it put a bit of a dent in newly forming work habits. It's also less fun when there's not a decent shower to be had, nor enough electricity to allow me to spend all day watching DVDs in bed.

The bandha is on today. For people new to Nepal/this blog a bandha is a work stoppage - where everyone from big factories to street vendors stop work for a morning/day/several days to protest something. This one is over the rising price of petrol and LPG - it's been a while since I've seen one quite this effective. Normally one can head off the main streets or into the tourist area to find life kicking on as usual, or things will start out serious and then ease off by about 2 when everyone is bored. But this time things are still well shut up at this hour of the day (if you don't know where to look).

All I can say is that I'm glad I didn't have to go anywhere more than walking distance today!

Back in the 'du

2012-01-22T21:13:00.000+11:00

It's nice to be back, but Nepal is having the coldest winter in quite a while and the chilly temperatures in the morning and evening are quite a shock. The days are still warm enough if the sky is clear and the sun can shine - and it's certainly a good topic of conversation.

Many people from last year are still in Kathmandu, which has eased the return, and today I get back into the full swing of things; a morning lesson with A. and them I'm off to deliver the dictionary-making gear to N. and his family. Here's hoping some mental exertion will distract me from the cold!

Hello, Goodbye

2012-01-12T08:18:00.003+11:00

Hello sadly neglected blog! Another field trip looms - I'll be back in Nepal on Monday for the final PhD-related visit. It's only two months, which I know sounds facetious given that two months is a long time, but after the previous visits this one feels much shorter. I'll also be spending a week of that time at a conference in India, as though two months weren't short enough already.

It's been a big year of linguistics for me. Superlinguo has taken over much of my linguistics blogging time, but there have been other adventures as well. On the work front I managed to get a dictionary printed up, and I'm starting a small-scale dictionary project with speakers of a related language.

In linguistic activities not related to the PhD specifically, I wrote an opinion piece for The Age on the commentary around politicians' language. My friend Jill and I did some work on LOLcats, which we presented at ALS, and it was rather popular.

I'm looking forward to this field trip. It's largely going to be double-checking things in the thesis and testing some hypotheses that have come out of recent analysis. So the work won't be too strenuous, I'm confident my Nepali will come back good enough to get by, and I'm excited to see everyone.

I'll be back here posting about the usual kinds of crazy things that happen when working in Nepal, and I'll cross-post any linguistically related topics both here and at Superlinguo. And as always I look forward to sharing the experience!

Spring at home

2011-10-03T11:32:00.002+11:00

Thanks to a couple of years of fieldwork it's been a long time since I've enjoyed a spring at home. It's been so nice with the football grand final, the start of daylight savings and the jasmine blossoms. It makes a change from the humid, sticky end of monsoon in Nepal!

First Lecture

2011-09-11T10:12:00.002+10:00

This year I'm making the most of being home for a whole 12 months by doing lots of teaching as well as lots of writing. Last week I was fortunate enough to give a lecture in the subject that I'm tutoring for! The subject is all about linguistic diversity, and it's designed for students who are at the end of their undergraduate course.

The class I had to take was on cross-linguistic variation in event description. I was lucky enough to be able to base it on two of my favourite areas of research - evidentiality and gesture. I used lots of real examples and all of my favourite examples. I was amazed at how quickly an hour of talking could go! Hopefully the students also found it relatively painless...

Strange ideas I sometimes have

2011-08-05T08:18:00.002+10:00

I was chatting to a class about dialects of English the other day, and how some are so different as to almost boarder on being non-mutually comprehensible.

How excellent and interesting it would be to get two disparate groups of English speakers - for maximal difference let's say northern Scottish and Indian - and get them to work together in a situation where there is no standard English. I wonder if they would try and drift towards a dialect that is not native to any of them, or create a pigeon/creole? I think it would be excellent to have a Creole where the superstrate and substrate languages are both English. I got terribly excited about the idea but the students didn't appear to take to it as much as I did.

Break time

2011-07-26T13:47:00.003+10:00

I handed a giant wad of printed pages to my supervisor last Friday, which somehow constitute my two-year report. I've got at least a week until she gets it back to me, so I'm using that time productively to get some serious tv/reading/gaming in, as well as a bunch of social engagements. It's so nice to have a few days brain recharge.

year three (?)

2011-07-08T10:20:00.003+10:00

Sometimes PhD comics are just a bit too close to reality:

I've technically been on leave for three months to get myself back on track after the last field trip (the kind of leave where you still work every day, which is not really fun). I should have done my 2 year milestone report about three or four months ago, and even if you subtract the 3 months leave it's still a good month or two over due. If it wasn't for the fact that the enrollment office keeps track of these things on the internet I'd have no idea that they're under the impression that I'm going to get this finished by the end of May next year.

New (financial) year resolution

2011-06-30T17:52:00.001+10:00

It's the end of the financial year here in Australia, although that doesn't mean too much to a PhD student.

While walking home from dinner the other night in the beautiful fog I decided rather abruptly that I would like to have a first draft of my thesis done by Christmas.

This is a good three months earlier than any other time-line I've considered, and also requires a terrifying words-per-week count - but I figure that while I'm brain deep in data I may as well just smash out as much of it as I can. I also figured that if I told the internets of this plan I'd be more likely to be stuck with it.

We'll see how I go - I've already written at least 10,000 words in the last month an my brain is already quite melty, but a draft would be the best possible Christmas present I can think of.

Map Win!

2011-06-28T11:18:00.004+10:00

I've so excited - I've just found out that the satellite images of the area I work have been updated in Googlemaps. So now, instead of pixely greenery I can see each village and the paths between them. It's going to make it a lot easier to map the area now, especially after my GPS tracker failed on the last trip.

I don't think I'm going to get any work done today, instead I'm taking a virtual tour of where I work!

Nepali cinemas banned from early session

2011-06-21T15:31:00.002+10:00

One of those "only in Nepal" stories today, from one of my favourite Nepal blogs that is not written by an ex-pat in Nepal or a Nepali-overseas; X-Nepali.

Their most recent post was on the news that the Film Development Board of Nepal have decided to act as moral police and stop early film screenings to stop students cutting classes. X-Nepali point out many good reasons why this won't work, and what other problems face school-age children in Nepal. But why I find it delightfully and typically Nepali is that the ban is on films before 11 am. In Nepal it is completely typical to see a film at 8:30 in the morning. Until I went to a session that early while there I don't think I'd ever set foot in a cinema before about 2pm.

I have no idea whether this ban will come into effect, but it will be interesting to see how the FDB fare coming between Nepalis and their beloved cinema.

The alphabeical bibliography

2011-06-16T10:16:00.002+10:00

I've been reformatting my bibliography for the work I've written so far and I've realised that I'm only a few letters off having a reference from people with surnames from every letter of the alphabet. The only ones I'm missing so far are:

F, I, Q, R, U, X and Y

The 'F' should be easy. I'll just mention something by Fürer-Haimendorf or Fisher who both wrote a lot about Sherpa, which is closely related to Tam. The 'R' will also be easy; one whole chapter of my thesis is a reflection on Robbins and Rumsey's 2008 collection on the Opacity of Mind doctrine. The others I'm not feeling so sure about. Surely there's a Young that's written something about Tibeto-Burman languages or copula verbs or something? Perhaps a Xaviers or Xenophone? A Quinn or an Unger?

Opening line

2011-06-11T23:47:00.003+10:00

When not finishing up the sketch grammar, most of my time this week was taken up with fretting about writing the introduction to my thesis. I always leave introductions until the end, but I have to have this one done for a meeting in a few weeks. I know I can always come back to it, but the first crack is never fun.

Given that the thesis is looking at how Tam has all these cool grammatical features that encode social information I decided to start with a truism: 'Humans are a social species.'

I relish the irony that it's past 11pm on a Saturday night and I'm sitting on the sofa in my tracksuit pants, ignoring Handsome (who is, in turn, ignoring me and playing computer games) and indulging in some very anti-social activity.

Sketch grammar done, for now

2011-06-10T08:56:00.002+10:00

I've finally finished adding all the additional bits to the sketch grammar part of my thesis! It's terribly exciting, even if it's a still a bit terrible in parts. There's not a lot I can do about that, I'll have to wait until I've written some other chapters so I can fix up this bit to reflect what is written further down the track. As you can probably tell, it turns out writing a document this big (ie. a book) is quite a different pace to how I normally write, and a lot more circular.

Still, for now I'm happy with where it stands - it's around 31 thousand words (31, 308, but who is counting?) - although around 7,800 of those are of examples, so I have 23,500 words of thesis content which is very exciting. Because all of the examples are presented so spaced out, and thesis formatting requirements include 1.5 spacing and giant margins the document is a 230 page behemoth - and that's without the title, table of contents, bibliography or any appendices. It's dawned on me that the final product is going to be pretty darn hefty, which I'm quite pleased about.

Speaking of final products, finishing the sketch grammar means that I can turn my attention to other matters, like the tiny problem of the 20 thousand words I have due for my 2 year milestone in 6 weeks time. This is going to include my introduction, general background reading and then look at a bit of data. I've already got a couple of thousand words kicking around, but that leaves me having to write 600+ words a day (although I've scheduled weekends in there). It's going to involve some serious finger crampage but I'm excited at the prospect of having half my thesis written once it's done!

Happy birthday Rajesh Hamal!

2011-06-08T08:21:00.003+10:00

Today is the birthday of one of my, and one of Nepal's, favourite actors - Rajesh Hamal.

Debonair, with a good voice and the ability to land a flying kick, Rajesh possesses all the skills needed to be one of the top actors in Nepal, which is why he has been for many years, and still continues to be. His youthful long hair allowed him to play a university student journalist in last year's Desh (my review here).

He's also king of Nepali product endorsement. It wasn't his fault that after his endorsement for Real Juice there was evidence they were selling out of date juice. During my time in Nepal I've also seen billboards where he's spruked concrete and canola oil - not to mention the dozen or so films he is in every year. Even turning 47 today Rajesh shows no sign of slowing down. Happy birthday Rajesh!

Stuff that (linguistic field workers) like

2011-06-04T10:27:00.002+10:00

I've been reading 'stuff expat aid workers like' since it started up six months ago. I was put into it by a friend doing aid work in Nepal - and while I occasionally find it hard to relate there are some posts that really hit home for me. For these you could do a find-and-replace with 'expat aid worker' and 'field linguist' and it would basically be a post on this blog. For these occasional gems SEAWL is the only 'stuff X like' blog that I always read.

The most recent post about 'having a guy for that' is so on the money with how I run my life in Nepal. I have my tailor, my shoe guy, my fabric guy, my Nepali sweets guy, my jeweller, my travel agent, my bookshop guy, my paan guy and all number of other specific people for specific jobs. Like the blog above mentions, I really like introducing friends and colleagues to 'my guys' and, of course, if you're going to Nepal I'll happily put you in touch with them.

Although the SEAWL post gives the impression that this set up is to make one feel more impressive when showing off in front of fellow foreigners, there are also other more practical reasons as to how these relationships develop. It's partly out of laziness - places like Kathmandu are big and if you want something but don't know where to start looking it can be a slow slow process. Once you found someone who'll get you what you need why go back to looking? Also, being such an old-ball giant white Nepali speaker means that going back to the same people every time circumvents the 'yes I do speak you language/no I'm not rich/I don't have kids/etc.' conversation. And finally, in a place where if always takes a little while to feel like you've got social connections, it's nice to have familiar faces to say hello to on your way though somewhere.

Snail Mail

2011-05-30T08:58:00.002+10:00

The Nepali postal system has set a new benchmark in tardiness and inefficiency. A postcard that I sent to the Handsome Penpal arrived on Friday. Which is quite impressive considering that I sent it in early October last year... good thing it didn't say anything too important!

My IPA craft project

2011-05-27T09:01:00.004+10:00

I don't normally cross-post content here and over at Superlinguo but I'm so excited that I've finally finished my Easter craft project that I want to share it with everyone.

I cross stitched the pulmonic consonants of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It ended up taking so long not because of the individual characters but because it took forever to grey out the areas that aren't physiologically possible.

If you're not familiar with the IPA I'll give you my patented 30 second lesson. The vertical categories vary by the place of articulation - that is where in the mouth they are made. The first are 'bi-labial', made with the lips. The 'p' and 'b' are more or less exactly as you make them in English, by time you get to the question-marky think you're at your glottis, where you make sounds. If you say 'uh-oh' that gap in the middle is a glottal stop. See, you make them without even knowing! Good work you! On the horizontal the difference is manner of articulation - that is how you make the sounds. The first ones are 'stops', which you make by closing your mouth fully at some point and releasing it. below that are nasals, such as 'm' and 'n' and 'ng' in English. And so on. A chart with all those labels can be found here. Linguists, and especially phoneticians, use these symbols to accurately represent the same sounds across many different languages.

Next I'll have to start on the vowels!

Negative failures and other post-trip data holes

2011-05-20T11:42:00.002+10:00

One of the most stressful things about field work is that you have a limited amount of time and an unlimited number of things you want to ask. Often you end up with so much more data than you can ever analyse, but sometimes it's not until you get home that you realise that no matter how comprehensive you've tried to be there are things you've forgotten to get.

One of the things I seem to generally forget is to make sure that I get the negative equivalent for some constructions. so while I have lots of 'let's do X' and 'I want Y' I don't have a lot of 'let's not do x' and 'I don't want Y.' I also can;t find a decently set out di-trasitive paradigm (X gave Y Z).

I'm sure that all these things are possibly buried deep in notebooks, especially from some of the older sessions when I wasn't as up to speed on databasing all the utterances I collected. Still, it's learning these things that make me more competent every trip. It's just annoying on a Friday when I just want to finish writing this chapter section.

Milestones

2011-05-04T17:43:00.002+10:00

This post is a post of milestones.

Today I hit 30,000 words in my mini-grammar of Tam. It's still unfinished, and I'm sure it'll grow and be pruned back before it's finished, but that's a heck of a lot of words and it has become quite an unwieldy thing.

Secondly, this is the 200th post on this site. Not bad for something I thought would last one trip. Of course, now I'm blogging over at Superlinguo I probably won't keep posting here quite so frequently.

And thirdly, since my last post this site has clocked up 4,000 visits. So thanks for stopping by!

Meet Superlinguo: new blog project

2011-05-02T07:49:00.002+10:00

The other day I mentioned that there was an exciting new project bubbling away in the background, and now I'd like to formally introduce you like you're two friends I've known for ages but who never show up to the same parties - I know you'll like each other.

Superlinguo is a radio segment presented by my good friend and fellow linguistics freak Georgia Webser at RRR fm in Melbourne. We've teamed up and now offer you Superlinguo the blog, over at Tumblr. It's your one stop fun shop for quirkiry from the world of languages and linguistics. You can also catch us @superlinguo over at Twitter.

I'll still be blogging here of course, so don't despair! But Lozguistics will go back to focusing largely on my work, and I guess be a little more technical than Superlinguo. Hopefully I'll see you over at Superlinguo some time!

RIP Sai Baba

2011-04-26T08:40:00.004+10:00

Anyone who has spent time in Nepal will recognise the image of the afro'ed orange-clad Sai Baba. An Indian Hindu mystic, his picture can be found in shops, homes and micro-buses alike.

Sai Baba died last night - you can read an obituary in the Kantipur Times here, or a slightly different take over at my friend Brian's site here.

Mother Tongue: Bill Bryson

2011-04-20T08:03:00.001+10:00

Ever since Bill Bryson's 1990 love letter to the English language became a snazzy orange Penguin Classic I've been meaning to give it a read. Last weekend, between meeting family and catching up with friends, I had a lot of commuting time to give it a read and finally finished it over the Easter break. Having read it I've written some of my thoughts on it, in what will be the first, and perhaps last, Lozguistics book review.

There are some observations about this book that need to be shared straight up. Firstly, this is not so much a book about English as a global language as it is about English as a British and American language. True, you can't really talk about the history of English or its rise to global popularity without mentioning these guys a lot, but English speakers in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and a score of other places might feel themselves to be somewhat under-represented. Secondly, this book is now the age of a fully licensed driver in Australia (21 years) and occasionally it shows. English in Asia is treated as an amusing curio, and it would be hard to say today that India as trying to distance itself from English these days as it's become the major identifier of the aspirational classes.

If you're looking for an amusing collection of anecdotes held together by Bryson's trademark wit and enthusiasm then Mother Tongue a great casual read. However there are a few things that rankled while I was reading.

The first is that Bryson falls into the trap of equating the different orthographic conventions of other languages with their difficulty. Sure, Gaelic languages have some very different spelling to English, but I'm sure that with five minutes and a conversion list you'd be doing ok. There are a lot more complicated things in life than remembering that for Irish Gaelic speakers 'w' is pronounced more like 'oo.'

Secondly, there are quite a few factual errors. He falls prey to the Eskimo snow hoax (the completely unfacual assertion that there are a zillion words for snow in Eskimo), refers to Tasmaina's indigenous languages as still being spoken when the last speaker died over a century ago. The couple of paragraphs on Australian English in the whole book are riddled with errors, the worst of which being the Bryson claims we prefer the word 'cookie' to 'biscuit' - you only have to ask the average Australian to see that he's wrong (unsurprisingly, his book about Australia 'Down Under' was written a decade later than Mother Tongue).

While the book is still an enjoyable read, once you spot a few errors it's hard to believe everything that's said. If he clearly doesn't know what he's speaking about when it comes to Australians how do I know that he's telling the truth about the Scottish?

Despite what I felt about these things, if you're looking for a fun read about English and don't want to be faced with any linguistic terminology then Mother Tongue is still an excellent read and stands above many of the books out there today. I wish I had a better memory so that I could use all of his excellent anecdotes about word origins, spelling conventions and word-play as my own. It's no surprise that it has become a Penguin Classic and will entertain for years still.

2011: year of writing

2011-04-19T17:43:00.003+10:00

So now I've been home a couple of months from my last field trip you may be wondering what my plans are from here. I'm kind of wondering that too - but one thing I can tell you is that this year there is lots (and lots) of writing ahead.

I've now completed the bulk of my data collection. I'll spend the next month or so finishing the sketch grammar for my thesis. This is the short document I've written about how the language works and will go at the start of the thesis. By short I mean about 30,000 words, which is pretty abbreviated when you consider that a full grammar can go up to 100 000 words easily.

Once that's all tidied up I'll get stuck into chapter writing. I've decided that for the thesis I'll focus on three main areas of Tam. The first will be the verbs that mean roughly the same as 'be' in English as these do really cool things. The next is reported speech - how you say what someone else said - which Tam has a couple of very different ways of doing. Finally I want to look at questions, because you use those 'be' verbs to do some cool stuff. Underlining all this is that these features are parts of language that really involve the outside context and especially fellow speakers to work effectively.

So hopefully by the end of the year I'll have written the majority of the thesis - around 80 000 words. This will give me enough time and space for a short 'mop up' trip some time next year.

There are other projects going on as well. I'm currently tutoring 1st year linguistics which is a blast. I've got a few papers planned with different people and a medium sized project. I've also got some other exciting things planned which I'll hopefully be able to share with you all soon!

Friends, and then some

2011-04-19T16:07:00.003+10:00

There was no silly Friday post last week as I was enjoying a brief visit up north. The trip was partly to catch up with various family and friends but also partly to attend the 100th birthday celebrations of the Handsome Pen Pal's (HPP) great Aunt.

We escorted the HPP's grandmother to the event - and didn't even get in the door of the venue before running into a crowd of relatives. I was introduced by grandma as the HPP's 'friend', which produced some sniggers from HPP and I as we are rather a bit too friendly to be classed as just friends. I wasn't too offended, I just assume that friend and girlfriend have rather similar meanings for her; my grandmother also occasionally refers to the HPP as my 'little friend', making him sound more like a pet than anything.

During the party the HPP clearly decided to hypercorrect his grandmother's earlier labelling by referring to me as his 'partner', even though he is much more likely to use 'girlfriend' in other situations. 'Partner' is, to my mind, an interesting and useful word. Broadly speaking I would say it has three main uses. 1) is when a de facto or relatively serious couple wish to mark out that they are in more than just a casual relationship - it's the kind of relationship where you love each other enough to happily tag along to great aunt's 100th birthdays. 2) gay couples who wish in certain contexts to sidestep mentioning their beloved's gender in a way that the gender specific boy/girlfriend can't. Although, of course, they can use it for reason 1 as well. Finally 3) more mature members of the dating pool who feel that it is a bit strange to refer to their new squeeze as their 'boyfriend.'

And so, in my geeky linguist way, I found it rather adorable that the HPP decided to talk me up while meeting relatives. In many ways it isn't too dissimilar to the contextually appropriate re-fabrication of truth (which some may call a lie) that I employ in referring to him as my 'husband' while working.

At the end of the day I overheard the HPP's grandmother refer to me as his 'girlfriend' - as I'd assumed, she didn't really see much difference between the two words. So all in one day I was a 'friend', 'girlfriend' and 'partner'; none of them particularly untrue but all with their own value-added nuance.

And how did I refer to the HPP? Well, I sidestepped the issue altogether and when people asked how I fitted in I would just gesture towards the HPP and say 'I'm with him' leaving it up to them to decided if I were his friend, girlfriend, partner, PA or security detail.

Cyber

2011-04-08T10:11:00.003+10:00

This is a photo I took while in Nepal, of an alleyway I'd travel down every time I visited the tourist trap that is Thamel - where there's Western food, English books and faster internet to be had in abundance.

I'd never have thought to have taken a photo, but every time I walked this way with the Handsome Pen Pal he'd quietly snigger like a naughty school boy. 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 online communities 'cyber' is short for 'cyber sex' - and so every time the HPP saw this sign and the many like it he found it to be hilarious and inappropriate.

Like Nepalis, I think it's perfectly acceptable to use 'cyber' as interchangeable 'internet' - it just goes to show that the same word doesn't always have to same meaning for everyone. After the HPP pointed it out I'd have a little snigger too, and thought I would share the joke with you to celebrate the end of the week.

Language and Literacy

2011-04-07T12:21:00.004+10:00

Although I'm generally not one to use this blog as a vehicle for promotion this is one occasion where there's something worth sharing with you.

A lot of the work I do for my research is language documentation - I listen to the language, I work with people and I write it down and try and explain how it works. But there's a whole other branch of working with people and language and that involves teaching them to be literate in their own language.

In the Western world so many of us take our literacy for granted, but in places like Nepal education for the masses is a rather recent idea and people are taught in Nepali, which is generally their second, or even third language.

The folk at the Language Documentation Centre (LDC) in Nepal are one of the few NGOs in the country trying to help people gain literacy in their own language. This has many flow-on benefits. Learning to read and write in your own language makes those skills easier to transfer to a second language (eg Nepali), it empowers people who thought their language was of little use/interest as it wasn't written down and it allows people to do those things we take for granted, like writing an inventory of stock in your shop or write letters.

This month, the LDC are trying to raise money to help female literacy in Nepal. Four thousand US dollars is enough money to help almost 500 women gain literacy. You can read more about their project and donate here. These guys are a really small NGO - they have about 3 full time staff and I can promise that none of the money you donate gets skimmed off to pay for glossy advertising or luxury cars.

Having seen firsthand the reality of life as an uneducated woman in Nepal I could give you endless reasons to give money. I know I sound like a cheesy celebrity ambassador but this is one way you can make a real difference.

Drag Queen Linguist Names

2011-04-01T10:33:00.003+11:00

Today I thought I'd kick off the Friday blog shenanigans again and share with you some linguistics based drag queen names I came up with while killing sometime yesterday. Linguistics is certainly not short on technical terminology to draw upon - and for any terms that might not be familiar I've included a web link, usually to Wikipedia.

Anne Affra (anaphora)
Jenny Tive (genitive)
Alla Tive (allative)
Mera Tive (mirative)
Len Ishon (lenition)
Elle Ipsis (ellipsis)
Al Veola (alveolar)
Cardinal Vowels (cardinal vowels)
Sir Kumfiks (circumfix)

As you can see, there's almost a whole family's worth of Tive. Feel free to add your own in the comments section below!

'to app' - my favourite new verb

2011-03-31T09:12:00.002+11:00

Last night I went out with some of my lovely friends to a local brewery that opens the doors to its own bar once or twice a week. It was a great chance to catch up with friends - but it never matters how pleasant the company is, how tasty the food is or how beery the beer is in these situations there's a part of my brain that just never stops thinking linguistics.

And so, at the end of the night when one of my responsible friends pulled out her phone to summons a taxi my ears pricked up when she said:

'I'm going to app a cab'

App a cab! This is excellent and mysterious, I thought. I asked my friend to explain. It transpires that there is a smart phone app that lets you order a cab and check the progress of your order. For the act of summonsing a cab using this app my friend appropriated the word app as a verb. This is not very exiting in itself, English is always taking nouns and making them verbs, it's something that English does very well - think of things like 'to email', 'to fax', 'to kindle' which all started out as nouns.

The linguist in me immediately set about trying to discern the meaning of the verb. It turns out that by checking TramTracker (A staple on any Melburnian's app list) one does not 'app a tram' but if there were an app that let you order pizza one could perhaps be 'apping a pizza' - among my small test group the jury was still out on that one.

I wonder whether 'to app' will make it into wider use. My friend told me that she acquired the verb from the same friend she acquired the app from, so it's not just a one-off coinage. It made me realise just how far 'app' has come from simply being the shortened form of 'application software' - it now has a life of its own. It's a potentially pertinent point given that Microsoft and Apple are currently having a bout of legal fisticuffs over the trademarking of 'App Store.'

What a Shocker of a gesture

2011-03-16T12:36:00.005+11:00

It looks like it's taken some front page gesture news to shake me out of my lethargy and get back into the swing of posting.

Over on The Age website this afternoon Jarryd Blair made a public apology following a 'hand gesture' that he made while his team were being photographed following their pre-season cup win. You can read the story here. Obviously events in Japan mean that it didn't stay as the main story for long - but longer than any other gesture related events in recent times.

The story centres around whether it was an offensive gesture or not. The offensive gesture in question is colloquially named as the 'shocker' which, if you're not too faint-hearted you can read about the meaning of here. Which, if you read it, gives some idea why people might have found it offensive.

But there are some questions - such as whether he was really making that gesture. Blair's thumb is not curled back and his two fingers aren't quite brought together. His apology conveniently sidesteps mentioning whether he knew the offense caused by his gesture, instead labelling his own actions as merely "careless and inappropriate."

But lets assume that he did intentionally pull that gesture, I'm sure the large majority of people would have been oblivious. This is an emblematic gesture, and like the 'peace sign' or rotating your finger near your temple to indicate 'crazy' the meaning of these gestures is only apparent if you already knew it. As far as the rest of us were concerned he's just doing a bad impression of a heavy metal music fan.

The irony is that the prudish folk who made this an issue by forcing an apology from Blair have made the event into a news item and drawn the attention of people who, like me, were happily ignorant of this little gesture until today.

Trip Stats 2010/2011

2011-03-09T11:35:00.002+11:00

Because it wouldn't be a field trip without keeping track of the important stats.

Days away: 160

Number of words currently in dictionary: 1215

Number of notebooks used: 9
Number of pages: approx. 464

Number of individual audio recordings made: 181

Weigh change: +6kg

Weight of bags on way to Nepal: 16kg
Weight of bags on way home: unknown
Number of bags of biscuits given to airport staff, thus avoiding knowing how over-weight my bags were: 1

Amount over budget: 23:47AUD

Number of hours spent on buses: approx 96

Top three most embarrassing moments:
1. Hitting a young child in the face with a frisbee
2. Burning a child's hair with a stick of incense
3. Having to step over a crying woman in a doorway at the funeral

Home again

2011-02-25T17:50:00.002+11:00

I always love coming home from a trip. All those things you take for granted when you love somewhere every day become novel again; fresh air, potable water, people who share the same frame of reference as you etc.

I'll probably be AWOL for a week or so, enjoying the things mentioned above and a few more, but I'll be back to share some of the final adventures that I had in Nepal, and outline what's planned for this year.

Goodbye KTM... for now...

2011-02-20T10:38:00.002+11:00

It's always easy at the end of a long trip like this to tell yourself that five months wasn't that long after all, and everything worked out pretty darn well. It has been a good trip in many ways; I've made lots of new friends - both foreigners and fellow visitors, I've improved my Nepali to the point where getting by every day isn't exhausting, and I'm coming home with much more thought out and better organised data.

So the trip has been good in many ways, and here at Lozguistics I like to keep things on the more lighthearted end of my time here, but there have been less-than-fun times as well. I've gained an impressive amount of weight thanks to a lack of running and an excess of rice and sugar tea, I'm pretty sure the aforementioned tea has left me with at least a couple of dental cavities, I spent at least 2 months with lice and at times I felt more homesick than I even have before.

But you take the bad with the good and there's been enough good to balance things. And it's definitely time to go home, digest my data, return to normal eating habits and be able to drink tap water. It's much easier to say goodbye to a place when you know you're coming back. My only regret from the last 5 months is that I didn't go see Bryan Adams play the first rock gig by a foreigner in Nepal last night.

Countdown

2011-02-19T11:35:00.003+11:00

As the countdown units for tomorrow's departure move from days to hours, Nepal also has a countdown under way; as of today it's 99 days until the deadline for a new constitution.

I don't want to go too much into the political situation here. This is, after all, supposedly a blog about Linguistics in Nepal, not Politics. I don't really follow politics here all that closely - it's hard to while cut off in the village and also it tends to rarely have any news worth celebration. Also, I like this blog to remain not so cynical and it's hard to do that when talking about the political situation here, where basically the only stable feature is the complete instability.

So it's no surprise that all major players in the constitution writing process are saying the deadline will not be met.

I've decided it's now a race between the Nepali constitution and my PhD thesis. I have between 12-18 months of funding left and a personal desire to wrap most things up by September 2012 (I feel like one day I'll regret committing this statement to a public forum). I'm willing to take bets, I think it's going to be close.

Packing

2011-02-18T16:33:00.002+11:00

The part of a trip that's never any fun is packing up to go home. The problem here is compounded by the fact that field work involves a lot of technical gear, and also that books in Nepal are really really cheap.

It means that it's all about the tough love when it comes time for packing. No fiction is coming home with me - and as a bit of a boon I've made a bit of money back selling them to the bookshops here. I've also ditched a lot of clothes, and the only toiletries that are coming home with me are my carry-on necessities.

Still, it's going to be a close call on Sunday at the airport. Let's hope I get a check in clerk who's in a good mood.

Style Cream

2011-02-17T11:24:00.003+11:00

Every time I see these chips in a store I have to giggle - and wonder what 'style cream' is supposed to taste like. I finally got around to buying a packet just for the photograph.

It may look like a very simple type setting error, but there's actually a reason for such an error. There are half a dozen flavours to chose from, and all of them are named for a country. So, off the top of my head, there's also "Italian Tomato" and "Indian Marsala." Only the "American" flavour is "style," that is, "in the manner of." Therefore it's no surprise that a non-native speaker parsing these packets would assume that "style" is modifying "cream" and not "American."

Even understanding the reason for the error doesn't stop me staggering every time. I'm sad to report that the chips do taste like sour cream and onion in American style, and not style cream, which I imagine would be a bit like eating hair styling products.

Rain

2011-02-16T18:35:00.003+11:00

Today and yesterday has been gray skies and constant rain - it all feels much more like a winter at home than the KTM dry season. It's all very confusing, and makes navigating the streets even more difficult. It also makes doing work more difficult, with the constant rain it makes doing audio transcriptions quite difficult!

There's also been some very impressive thunder and lightening. One of the small towers at Swayambhunath got struck by lightening Monday night - you can check out the damage here.

Soshan: film review

2011-02-16T15:00:00.001+11:00

A critic of Nepali cinema can't really afford to be critical. To pick on the problems that plague Nepali cinema would really be to miss the point. It doesn't really matter if the flashback to the hero's mid-90s childhood involves flat screen televisions. Nobody cares that the music from the dramatic points are taken directly from other films (tunes from both Star Wars and Indiana Jones made it into Sashan without a shred of Post Modern mashup irony). And lose plot points don't really bother anyone (where did the female lead's grandmother disappear to during interval?).

So if we're to ignore the plot errors, shoddy editing and occasionally woeful acting then what's left? Well clearly more than enough for Nepali audiences, who exhibit an enthusiasm that Australians usually reserve for a game of football. It's completely appropriate to cheer on the hero as he rescues the love interest with some improbable fighting skills. It's fine to turn to your friend and offer your opinion of the film as some kind of live audio commentary. And if it's getting dull call your friend and offer a commentary to them.

Sashan is the story of a rich man and his son. Our hero turns up at one of his father's villages to open a new hospital dedicated to his mother. There he falls in love with a local village girl. Cue many song and dance numbers and many costume changes (which are a way to show off ones budget). The hero stops a local bad man from kicking the girl's family out of the village (by grabbing the sharp end of a machete - Nepali heros have some improbable qualities), and realising their love for each other they get married. Our hero must dash off overseas for something important, leaving his new wife waving goodbye as his helicopter flies off over the mountains (again helicopter = impressive budget).

This would probably be enough material for a whole film, but it's just setting the scene. The girl's family are eventually bested by the baddie, and seek help from the hero's father. When they arrive at the palatial house nobody knows about the marriage. the son has a girlfriend and is frankly rude to the woman who loves him. The rich man lets the girl and her father stay. While there we watch her heartbreak - then the hero's older brother kills the girl's father because he finds the hero drunkenly harassing the girl who's really his wife. The police find the girl with her dead father on the road and arrest her for murder. By this point she's also quite clearly pregnant, to add to her woes.

Still following? Just when things can't get worse it transpires that the hero has a twin brother, thus solving the mystery of his rudeness. But our hero is heartbroken when his dad tells him that she is dead - it's ok, nan breaks down and tells him she's in jail when she can no longer bear the guilt of knowing that the hero's mother was killed by his father because he thought she was sleeping with the chauffeur. And the hero's older brother? Actually the son of the chauffeur. The elder brother goes crazy and kills the whole family as a very slowly delivered revenge. He kidnaps the hero's very pregnant wife and stages an improbable death for her - letting the hero have a chance to come in, guns blazing, and singlehandedly shoot down a battalion of thugs and save his beloved - who has quite forgiven him for not being his nasty twin. Cue happy ending with hero, heroine, cute new baby and hero's nan who has somehow survived. There was also something about the UN security council but I can't say I understood that.

Nepali films are generally fairly similar to each other. They all have a good mix of fighting, romance, family drama, song, dance and unpredictable plot twists. Like Desh, this film had several didactic monologs from the hero exposing the many virtues of good Nepalis. Like my favourite Nepali film Kusume Rumal this film also had one dance scene full of cross dressing. I'm not sure if this is a common feature of Nepali films, but I'm sure there's a great thesis in it.

One thing I've noticed is that every time I go to the cinema I understand more. I can't say I really follow the intricacies of the plot - UN security council? And how did the girl not figure out that the hero had a twin? - but I can figure out how people are related to each other and the general gist of what they're saying.

Going to see a Nepali film is like I imagine Indian cinema was 30 or 40 years ago. In many ways it would be a shame if they stopped dubbing the dialog in post-filming, and if car breaks didn't squeal every time a car stopped. The charm of Nepali cinema is not in the quality of its production, but in the enthusiasm that the audiences bring to it.

Funerals

2011-02-15T10:55:00.002+11:00

I've finally got around to adding a couple of photos to the post I wrote about the village funeral I went to a few weeks ago. I was reminded because yesterday I went to not one, but two Buddhist funerals.

These were slightly different to the last one, as both of them were cremations. The previous ceremony I attended was about helping the spirit move on to the next phase of its existence, while both of these were about fare welling the more physical elements. In the more northern parts of Nepal and in Tibet sky burial is a common way to return the body to the world - leaving the body exposed to birds of prey and other animals. However it's not so practical in Kathmandu or the hills where I work and cremation is preferred.

Like the village funeral both of these events involved a lot of butter candles, a lot of feeding people and whole lot of incense. What was interesting at both of these events is that there seemed to be a lot more gender segregation - with women doing the majority of the cooking, praying and crying.

It is perhaps something of a shame that I didn't get to stay to see either cremation take place - but after visiting Pashupatinath I think I've inhaled enough ashes of dead people for one trip to Nepal.

Another wedding

2011-02-13T14:10:00.002+11:00

During my last stay in the country I got to attend another wedding. This one was smaller than the last, and because I kind of had a hang of the format and basic Tam conversation I found it all a lot easier than the last one.

This wedding was interesting because the couple already had a 2 year old daughter. While having children before marriage is becoming increasingly more common back home it's not something I've come across here a lot. Or at all. Courtship is usually a bit of a whirlwind here (or taken care of by one's parents) so there usually isn't time for a pre-wedding bub.

People I talked to in the village said this kind of arrangement is becoming more common, and there certainly seemed less scandal about it than I would expect in Kathmandu.

Tan

2011-02-12T11:38:00.004+11:00

Having spent the last 5 months in Nepal pretending to be married I now have such an impressive wedding ring tan that when I return to Australia and stop wearing the ring it's going to be tough to convince people I'm not pretending not to be married.

Losar

2011-02-11T16:05:00.002+11:00

I was really excited that this year my trip coincided with Losar - the Tibetan New Year. I arranged everything so that I'd be in the village for the festivities and was looking forward to sharing lots of anecdotes and photos with you.

However, Losar turned out to be a bit of a fizzer. The uncles who usually organise the party were working overseas this year, and no one stood up to fill their place. Most of the people who wanted to dance and party went to a village a few hours away and so the rest of us had a very quiet night of it.

Although Losar may have been a fizzer I learned one important lesson - it doesn't matter what type of New Years you celebrate, if you just rock up on the night and hope for an entertaining evening it's usually a flop.

Load Shedding

2011-02-10T12:48:00.002+11:00

"Load Shedding" is something I've alluded to a few times in posts here, but I've never explained what it is properly.

Basically, there's more demand for power in Kathmandu than there is power. This is partly because most Nepali electricity is generated by hydro-power, and now that it's dry season there isn't so much water around. According to most Nepalis it's also because Nepal sells its electricity to India so it can make money instead of delivering it here.

To deal with this shortfall, whatever may be causing it, the city is divided into seven blocks and they alternate who has access to power. throughout parts of the year you may find yourself without power for a a couple of hours a day - never more than about 8 hours through out the week. At the moment, however, in the very depths of the dry season we are without electricity for approximately 14 hours a day. You can check out this week's schedule here, if you're curious I live in group 6.

Given that I do a large amount of work on computers, this is obviously an inconvenience for me, but it constantly amazes me that the city continues to function as it does at all. On most nights one can hear the steady hum of generators (a must of any size business that wants to survive here), and meals by candle light aren't romantic, just pragmatic.

It's things like constantly streaming electricity that I take for granted at home, but when you're without it for more than half of every day it suddenly becomes rather a luxury!

A dozen days

2011-02-09T22:15:00.004+11:00

I'm back in Kathmandu, quantifiably older (no longer in my early 20s!) for the final dozen days of my field trip. These I plan to spend tidying up data, sleeping in read beds, catching up with people, eating salads and having a few final frantic data sessions.

The final jungle adventure continued to be a shambles. My main consultant didn't surface until my final few days, there was a week without power that made working hard, and there was a wedding and Losar in there too - not to mention that I had a supernasty bout of gastro that put me out of action for a few days. With all that ot's impressive I got any work done at all.

I'll be sharing some of those adventures over the next few days, for now I need some more salad and an early night.

Final village adventures

2011-01-27T17:22:00.002+11:00

After my two days of R&R I'm back off for my final 2 weeks or so of village living.

It should be a hectic fortnight – There's another wedding, as well as a dance. There's also Losar, the Tibetan New Year which will be a few more days of eating and partying. It will also be my birthday while I'm there. I have no intention of actually telling anyone in the village this, after all, it's not like any of them will be able to make me pancakes. I don't mind having such a low key birthday, although it will be with a tinge of sadness to note that I'm now to old to be let loose on air at my favourite Youth Radio Station. No longer part of the 'yoof' but still kicking about at the same university I did my undergrad at… still, there's no time to be to introspective about it, I've got work to do!

Next time you hear from me I'll be in KTM and getting ready to say goodbye to Nepal!

Going to a funeral

2011-01-27T17:03:00.003+11:00

Funerals are never something you really want to go to. But when it's for a 92 year old woman you've never met who died peacefully in her sleep, and you've never been to a Buddhist funeral before the idea of it doesn't seem too bad. At 92 she well outlived the Nepali life expectancy of 67 years.

Much like a Tam wedding, a funeral is a protracted, multi-day event involving many people, much food and a good deal of socialising, dancing and more eating.

It was an hours trek to the village – once again we left so late that we were scrambling in the dark by time we drew near – many of the party having walked all the way from the main town 4 hours away.

The tent that was erected for the funeral

That night was all daal, rice and sel roti - which is the default party food, and great for serving to large crowds. Thankfully, unlike weddings, funerals are a vegetarian affair so there was no need to worry about what I was eating this time.

The first day was a flurry of activity, it appeared there were mainly close family around, and lots of priests who had come from across the community to help celebrate the event. There was a large tent set up, and inside funeral offerings were set up. These are called torma, and are red sculptures made of flour and decorated. They look amazing all set up - from a distance they reminded me a lot of Russian Orthodox architecture. These sculptures take a whole day to make and are destroyed after the event.

I should probably mention there was no corpse, Buddhist funerals are about helping speed the spirit on to the next phase and much less about the corporal farewell that Western funerals are so focused on. The body had been cremated a fortnight ago and the local cremation site. This event was being held 21 days after death – These Buddhists have a thing for odd numbers, and especially seven.

The day after many more people came from all over the place. There were more prayers, more eating and hundreds of candles made of butter were lit in batches of 108 (another auspicious number). As soon as they were burnt down they were refilled, left to set, and relit giving the whole affair a buttery odor to mix with the incense.

[photos will follow when I'm back in KTM]

That afternoon, evening and late into the night there was dancing – but I'm afraid I missed this as I had to leave to call my little sister on her birthday. Also, after two days of sleeping on the floor being spooned by middle-aged women and woken at 4 am I decided it was about time I got some sleep in my own hard bed.

It was definitely a great experience, and I'm glad I was invited along. Again, no one really questioned why a Christian was there talking part, in fact a lot of people were very kind in explaining what was happening. Once again my halting Tam conversational skills were a bit hit and I met a lot of really interesting people. There was some weeping (and a very awkward moment involving me climbing over a hysterical 70 year old who threw herself down in a doorway and couldn't be moved) but on the whole it was a very positive and optimistic affair.

Mini-break

2011-01-26T20:11:00.002+11:00

I've come to town for a few days to enjoy some time along and some food that isn't daal bhat. Also, it's much warmer down here, and the place I'm staying even has tepid water for showering!

This trip to the village is proving to be a frustrating one. My main speaker has gone AWOL so I'm scrambling around doing much less work than I should and wonering how I'll be it all done before heading back to KTM in a couple of weeks.

Still, the thing about working with language in a field work context is to remember that people speak language. If I wanted less stress I could have chosen a topic where I stay at home and use nice safe data (databases, catalogs, archives, University people) - but really, where would the fun in that be?

And so I find myself the only Australian in town on Australia day. I think I'll try and remember where that shop was that sold dusty bottles of cheap South Australian red.

To the villages! One last time...

2011-01-14T12:52:00.002+11:00

Once again I've stuff everything back into bags, said my round of farewells at my usual haunts around town and I'm ready to head back to the village for my final stay.

I'm looking forward to it, with excitement and trepidation. Trepidation because whatever I fail to collect on this trip wont get collected. Excitement because I'm getting more comfortable there with every visit. Also, with Kathmandu experiencing 'load shedding' (i.e. no electricity) for over 12 hours a day I'll actually have more consistent electricity in a tiny backwater village than in the capital of the country.

It should be another adventure-filled adventure. I'll be there for Losar, the Tibetan New Year, as well as my birthday (not that I'll likely be telling them that) and I heard from a friend that there's a funeral scheduled in one of the villages in a few days time. I didn't know the person, but like Tam weddings that seems to be a minor concern regarding my attendance.

Where linguists go to party

2011-01-12T15:30:00.003+11:00

Sorry to the non-linguists reading today. This is a photo of a bar in Pokhora. For those who need the joke explained, X-bar is a very popular way of dealing with syntax. And for those who need that explained, syntax is figuring out the rules of how words and stuff fit together to make sentences.

Making News

2011-01-10T12:46:00.002+11:00

After a lovely long Christmas lunch that also filled up a couple of the early hours of the evening, the Handsome penpal/fake Husband and I decided to walk around the tourist area of Kathmandu enjoying the festive ambiance.

While trying on silly hats at a roadside store we got chatting to a couple of people also playing with the merchandise. One of them was a reporter for one of the Nepali language newspapers writing about how Christmas is celebrated in Kathmandu.

We chatted for a while, mainly in Nepali, about Christmas here, and how it compares to the warm weather in Australia. He asked if he could quote me, I said sure, he took some notes and we went on our way.

The next morning we picked up a newspaper, and low and behold there was the report! I was rather impressed at getting my name into a Nepali newspaper. As I read on (largely with the help of a dictionary, my written Nepali skills aren't great) I also became highly amused.

There was the usual low-lying Nepali male misogyny to kick off the piece - where I was introduced as the "Australian beauty" - but that was pretty par for the course and not too much of a surprise.

What was more amusing is that, for much of the three or so passages attributed to me as direct quotes I had to look up the words in a dictionary because I didn't know then. According to the article I referred to the "waataawaran" (environment) of festivities and the "jhilimilii" (glittering) lights. These weren't the only words I had to look up before I could understand what I had apparently said.

It's not surprising the quotes aren't word perfect, considering he was scrawling dot points into a notepad. In fact, I'm rather glad he made my Nepali more eloquent for me!

N-gram games

2010-12-18T23:49:00.002+11:00

Google have announced a new toy to play with - actually, it's not really a toy, but the biggest searchable English language corpus in the world. 360 billion words from around 5 million books are at your disposal. That's over a thousand times larger than any existing corpus.

It's not as well structured as some university-based corpora - for example, they've side-stepped the issue of copyright with newer books by not showing you the context of the word you're searching for. There's also no ability to fine tune for genre, or anything other than "British" or "American" English. But it's still a lot of fun. There's a nice discussion about it here on good ol' Language Log, but if you're more interested in just playing you can head here.

I thought I'd use it on some old lexical friends of ours to see how it goes. First of all, after our recent discussion about "luck out" I plugged in that phrase. These are the frequencies I got:

Given that there wasn't much in the newspaper corpora from earlier than the mid 20th century this chart adds to the theory that "luck out" is a relatively recent phrase. Especially when we look at some of the examples from the 19th century and find things like:

we must not leave " good luck" out of the statement, as we feel assured that ' good luck' is a great point towards a fortune (Pierce Egan's book of sports, and mirror of life, 1832, p. 71)

or

Have yure eyes about you, and luck out for sparks (Thomas Hood, Hood's own, or, laughter from year to year, 1939, p. 352)

The first being a different structure, but still picked up thanks to the OCR not picking up punctuation while the second appears to be an outdated way to spell 'look.'

The same types of mistaken reading occur up until the first reference I've found for the phrase as we know it. In George A. Meyer's 1975 book "The two-word verb: a dictionary of the verb-preposition phrases in American" where we find the entry for "Luck":

Used as a verb only in the expression "luck out", luck out I (9) Slang. John lucked out when his motorcycle crashed into the big truck. (He was not seriously injured.)

This adds weight to the earlier analysis that the 'positive' definition of "luck out" is more of a USA usage than a UK one - and with the earliest usage I could find was a quote from a baseball player in 1971 the time frame for this 1975 book entry is also about right. After that 1975 entry there are more that pop up, and it appears that the sharp upward curve in the frequency count is somewhat attributable to increase in this phrase

Another old friend of ours here is the pejorative term "douche bag." Here we see a spike in usage in the 1920s:

The 1920s peak in usage is from the heyday of the douche bag as a piece of medical equipment, and the search function provides you with a baffling and occasionally scary array of books and journals on the topic. These kind of references occur right into the 2000s, and are still more common than the derogatory usage, but this begins to creep in during the 1970s and 1980s. Still, these references are not nearly as common as to single-handedly explain the rise in usage of "douche bag" since the 1970s.

Strangely enough, our old buddy "awkward turtle" has not made it into a publication in the Google corpus. This is possibly because the corpus stops in 2000 and "awkward turtle" is newer, but also likely to do with the fact that only using published book corpora gives a limited type of language use. A reminder that while book and published material corpora are interesting and useful they're not always the final word on language use!

You too can play at home! The Lousy Linguist has a great little post today about how not to interpret n-grams, but have a play for yourself and if you find anything amusing let us know below!

Happy New Year!

2010-12-18T21:45:00.004+11:00

After a lovely few weeks holiday I've sent my own personal Porter back home - with a chuck of my ever-growing book collection. Having time off over the Christmas and New Year period was lovely, and certainly a different experience to this time of year back home. I'll share a few of our adventures over the next week or so before I head back to the village and leave email behind me for a few weeks.

One of the social highlights of the holiday was New Years Eve, when we met up with some friends, and a few of their drunk friends and ended up at a jazz bar drinking cocktails until the small hours. Of course, the Western New Year isn't that exciting in Nepal - it's one of at least a dozen that crops up.

There's the Nepali New Year which is in mid-April - it's based on the Bikram Sambat calendar also used in India. We're currently in the year 2067, which actually makes 2011 seem a little behind the times.

Then there's the Newari New Year - Newars being indigenous to the Kathmandu Valley, and their calendar is the Nepal Sambat. For them, New Year falls in around Tihar, so some time in November and we're only in the year 1332 right now. There's a push among certain groups to get this recognised as the official calendar of Nepal.

Next is Tibetan New Year, known as Losar, and celebrated by various ethnic groups in Nepal that are Buddhists of the Tibetan schools. But, to make things complicated, there are no fewer than three different dates for Losar. The first is Sonam Losar, which follows the lunar new year. The thing I like most about Losar is that it is celebrated for two weeks - which sounds like a proper party to me! This is the Losar date that Tam speakers celebrate - and for 2011 the first day conveniently falls on my birthday. The second Losar, Gyalpo Losar, is celebrated on the 5th of March in 2011. It's celebrated by Buddhists from Tibet and several Buddhist ethnic groups in Nepal. Finally, the Gurung ethnic group celebrate Tamu Losar as a fixed date every year, as opposed to basing it on the lunar calendar. These guys actually kicked of the Losar season, with Tamu Losar falling on the 15th of Poush, on the Nepali Calendar - which this year was the 30the of December - meaning they were recovering from their hangovers just when Westerners were embarking on theirs.

The Tharu ethnic group in the Terai - the flat lands in the south of Nepal that are heavily farmed - also celebrate New Years on a different date, although I should find out more about them. And there is a small but not insignificant Muslim population in Nepal which means that they recently celebrated the Islamic New Year on the 26th of November.

Deck Nepal with boughs of holly

2010-12-18T20:48:00.003+11:00

With the arrival of the Handsome Pen pal now only hours away I've decided to give the blog a bit of a rest over the Christmas break. I'm determined to try and do no work for the next couple of weeks - although I'm sure I'll find more language factoids to share with you, and crazy adventures always have a habit of finding me here.

While I'm away, I thought I'd use the break to take questions from the floor. If there's anything you've ever wanted to ask me, now is the time. Whether it's about life in Nepal, Tam and other specific languages, or just linguistics-y stuff in general feel free to put it as a comment below or, should you know my email address, write to me there and I'll answer throughout January.

Of course, this could backfire spectacularly if it turns out that my readership figures just come from my mother constantly hitting refresh on her browser to check I'm still alive.

Have a lovely Christmas and a great start to 2011!

Going Dutch

2010-12-17T12:39:00.003+11:00

I've made friends with another resident-guest at the guest house I'm staying in while back in Kathmandu. He is form Holland and volunteering at the school next door - I shall refer to him as Jan for future reference.

Since hanging out with Jan I've met more Dutch people in Kathmandu that I did when I was in the Netherlands. They are all variously interesting people, I don't think either Kathmandu or Jan tend to attract dull people. Last night when we decided to venture out to a nice Newari place I found myself to be the only non-Dutch person at dinner.

It was a lovely dinner; the food was nice, the conversation interesting and we were in a lovely old building. When it came to the end of the evening, and paying the bill Jan turned to me and said - "we all pay for ourselves, that is how we do it at home".

In Australia the colloquialism for this kind of payment arrangement is "to go Dutch" - and so I went Dutch with a table full of Dutch people, and spent the next 5 minutes telling them how amusing it was that what I had always thought was a bit of a nonsense phrase really did appear to have its etymology in the bill paying practices of the Dutch.

"hmm, you really are a linguist, aren't you" one member of the party concluded, in what he assured me was a complement.

Hard to here sounds

2010-12-17T11:58:00.000+11:00

For the last couple of days I've been adding new words to the dictionary from a list one of my consultants made for me. We've currently got about 1140 words, if you don't count affixes like the plural suffix, (which is -ya).

Anyway, I thought this would be a good time to share with you one of the reasons that I find working with Tam is difficult, and that is the different sounds that it uses.

Different languages have different sound systems, that's one of the reasons they sound so different. Sure, most languages might have a vowel that kind of sounds like 'a' but there's every chance it's a little bit different.

We lock into these sounds very early on in our language learning, some research shows that we begin to pick up on some of it by listening to our mothers voices before we're even born. And we get very good very quickly at making the sounds in our own language. It's how Arabic speaking children have no trouble with all those glottal sounds that always get me, or how English speakers can say 'th' with ease.

So we tune into the differences that are found in our own language which means we stop paying attention to distinctions that can be found in other languages. this is why I can't hear the difference in Polish between three different sounds that all sound like 'sh' to me, or how some English speakers can't roll their r.

When it comes to Tam, the worst sounds for me all sound like 'ta' or 'da'... while in English we only perceive two sounds there's a lot more happening in Tam.

Firstly, in English we only have 't' and 'd' - which is a voicing distinction. Try saying each with your hand on your throat and you'll notice that it vibrates more when you say 'da' than 'ta'. In Tam, there is the voiced 'd' sound and the unvoiced 't' sound, and also an aspirated 't' sound (which gets written with a h next to it) - this third sound is a 't' but with more air coming out with the sound. So we have three sounds 'd', 't' and 'th' where English only has two.

Secondly, Tam has retroflexes, which English doesn't. A retroflex sound is where you curl your tongue up so the bottom bit touches the roof of your mouth. It's quite a common sound for this corner of the world - Nepali has it and it gives Hindi some of the rhotic (r-sounding) quality associated with it. There's a retroflex for each of the above sounds, which I'll write them in capitals. so there's 'T', 'Th' and 'D'.

Thirdly, Tam has tone. Tone is a feature of many languages - if you've learned Chinese or Vietnamese you've come across it. Basically the vowel sounds higher or lower. Fortunately Tam only has two tones, high and low. And, thanks to some complex historical reasons that I shan't bore you with, aspirated sounds only have high tone, and voiced sounds only have low tone, but unvoiced and unaspirated sounds such as 't' or 'T' can take either. So there's another distinction that English speakers don't make.

Finally, there is a vowel length distinction that's very hard to hear. While there's 'a' there is also 'aa'. English has long and short vowels too, but there is also a quality different, the throat area tends to be more tense for short vowel and lax for long vowel. But in Tam it's only length and can be quite hard to hear. So that doubles the amount of options that there were.

So in English we have 'ta' and 'da' - which means that we can hear the different between 'tag' and 'dag'. In Tam, instead of just a two way difference, all those variables give us sixteen different sounds. That means that Tam speakers hear the difference between 'tag' (with low tone), 'tag' (with high tone), 'Tag' (with low tone), 'Tag' (with high tone), 'dag', 'Dag' 'thag', 'Thag', 'taag' (high tone), 'taag' (low tone), 'Taag' (high tone), 'Taag' (low tone), 'daag', 'Daag', 'thaag' and 'Thaag'.

While my ear has gotten better the longer I listen to Tam, there's still a lot of times that I can't hear the difference, which can make writing up the dictionary rather hard!

Debate O'clock

2010-12-14T22:23:00.002+11:00

Over at the Economist they're running an online debate about that old linguistic chestnut "does the language you speak shape the way you think?" Check out the fisticuffs here

I'm sure most of the comments will just degenerate into "I speak language X and in my personal opinion..." but it's always a great topic. It's subtle, and messy and, if argued with any sophistication, nuanced - but it goes right to the heart of why we use language, where (or if) the boundary should be drawn between language and culture and just what happens in our heads.

Also, it's always exciting for linguistics to get a gig in the mainstream media!

Wedding: now with photos!

2010-12-13T12:54:00.000+11:00

Now that I'm back in Kathmandu I've added photos to the wedding adventures. You can read about all the fun I had at a 3 day Nepali wedding here and here.

Iron stomach

2010-12-12T11:59:00.003+11:00

On this field trip I am cursed with the twin good fortunes of being well-fed by the friends I live with when I'm in the village, and also having a very robust digestive system.

Last trip I was also relatively well fed - but spent more time living alone in KTM where I had more autonomy as to what I would eat, and how much. Also, for most of last trip, I was - to a greater or lesser extent depending on the week - quite sick. It's not something I really mentioned on the blog partly to prevent unnecessary worry and partly because it was so persistent it wasn't worth mentioning. So even with an unhealthy diet and a lack of exercise routine last year I still managed to come home not looking too different to when I departed (I did lose a heap of weight in the middle and ate a lot of cake to make up for that).

My iron digestive track has lead to the development of a stomach a little less solid and a little softer.

I have never eaten so much in my life as I do in the village here - and growing up with a Polish grandmother I can tell you that is not a flippant statement. How they eat so much rice is beyond me. The strangest thing is that after a week we had to sit down and have a serious conversation because my friend has been concerned that I'm not eating much. I pointed out that Nepalis eat a lot more rice than Australians - I didn't point out that since they won't let me do any work I'm not as hungry as she is after 8 hours in the fields.

Of course, having a more robust digestive system has made me much more cavalier about where I eat and what I eat. I still don't ever think I'll be able to eat the fresh coconut sold on the streets of Kathmandu, no matter how much my mouth waters every time I walk past - but I have eaten all manner of questionable things on this trip and remained unscathed.

I'll just have to hit the salads and bike riding when I get home.

A white christmas... in the distance

2010-12-12T11:31:00.003+11:00

This year marks the second time in my life I'll celebrate Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere - and once again I'm not doing a very good job of a traditional Christmas.

Last time was in 1998 when my family celebrated with some friends in California. That involved poolside margaritas in the sun (well, margaritas weren't for me, given that I was about 13 at the time) making it much more like your average Australian Yuletide celebration.

This time Kathmandu is sunny, if a little chilly in the mornings. The good thing is that as long as it's a clear day (smog permitting) and we go somewhere with a good view we should be able to see snow covered mountains in the distance.

This year is the first time I'm spending Christmas anywhere other than a Christian-heavy Western country. To date, the festivities consist of one scraggy Christmas tree in the trekker's supermarket, and Sufjan Steven's Christmas EPs on repeat. This doesn't upset me too greatly - I find Christmas in Australia faintly nauseating, possibly a hangover of too many years working in retail. Also, this year I'm more excited about the countdown to the arrival of the Handsome Pen pal rather than Santa Claus. Still, I love spending time with my family at Christmas, I think in the next week or so it'll dawn on me that I'm missing that, and my grandmother's Christmas pudding.

Tech Dramas pt. 2

2010-12-11T13:33:00.002+11:00

First of all, let me say I am enjoying being back in Kathmandu

After my first bout of tech dramas earlier in the trip the small problems keep trying to trip me up.

Firstly, and most frustratingly, my own portable hard drive has decided to stop working, but only with my PC - it's still talking to my Mac (perhaps it's a snob) but that makes backing up and transferring something of a pain. Also, because I only had my PC with me for the last month it meant wasting my 16GB SD card as a temporary back up facility.

Secondly, I've been left with a giant terrabite hard drive to deliver to someone, as well as use for myself. First of all, it's annoying because KTM currently has 4-6 hours without electricity a day, so thanks to its external power requirements it's useless for large chunks of the day. Also, someone has done something to the settings and now I can't copy to it, so it's become completely useless to me as a back up option.

Third woe is that my little GPS tracker I was so excited about has stopped working. Most annoyingly, it tells me with its deceptive little blinking light that everything is ok, and then when I stick it into my computer it tells me there's no data there. The only thing more annoying than tech failing you is tech failing you after 8 hours of walking up and down hills.

I'm still getting stuff done, but if there's one thing that freaks me out it's having insufficient back up. I may sound like I'm being hyper-sensitive on the issue of backing stuff up, but I had a very traumatic experience a few years ago where I lost three different back ups of my work in the space of a week (laptop stolen, thumb drive error and then bag stolen) and would have lost all my work had I not left a backup CD at my parents place (huzzah for off-site storage!) so I'm kind of a bit highly strung about this stuff. Thankfully I've still got everything it an least 3 different places!

Farewell sleepy little town

2010-12-08T19:47:00.002+11:00

Tomorrow I'm heading back to Kathmandu to count down the days until Christmas, and eagerly await the arrival of the Handsome Pen pal/faux-Husband.

Living in a small town has been a very different experience from big-city KTM and also very different from living in a small village. One thing you notice very quickly is it's small enough for everyone to recognise you, but unlike a small village they won't come and talk to you, only look at you.

I've made myself some friends here - the cook place where I go for lunch most days, a woman from a beauty shop who I purchased some shampoo from the first day has become someone I chat with every day.

Also, having nothing to do here besides leave the house for lunch and a walk around town (which takes approximately 25-30 minutes to do a lap) it's also proven to be a rather productive place to work. Still, I'm very eager to be getting back to KTM. High on the list of things to do are eat salad, have a shower with warm water and get a massage. I'm not sure what order to do those things, but probably not at the same time.

Wedding (pt. 2): Taking your new wife home

2010-12-05T18:45:00.003+11:00

[note: now with photos! 13/12/10]

Part one can be found here.

To date: the 7 hour party trek to the bride's house ended in celebrations, eating, dancing, singing, and all-night carousing.

The party was in no way over. Once again, we joined the celebrations when they reached our village, the band was heard long before the party arrived. When I say the groom was taking his new bride home I mean it quite literally. The bride was covered in a large blanket and carried all the way to her new village by her new husband. That's a good 7 hours of walking, a large part of which included steep ascents and descents on poorly maintained stone paths.

The groom's village was a place I hadn't visited, so I quite liked the walk. The pace was set to something between meandering and wandering and there were lots of stops along the way. The groom lived down in the valley near the river, and closer to a large town, so when we arrived there was a much larger open space as well as plastic chairs and electric lighting.

By this point I had perfected my mantra of answers I would repeat in every conversation “Australia”, “yes, he's in Australia”, “no children yet” and “2 ½ months” conveniently I'm half way though my trip so this does for both questions “when did you arrive” and “when are you going.” Answering such questions in Nepali provoked the usual response of amazement and wonder, but answering them in Tam left most people utterly bewildered. There were lots of people there that hadn't met me yet, and none of them had ever heard someone from beyond their own social group, let alone a foreigner, speak their language before. I was instantly adopted by more than a few old women over the course of proceedings.

There was more singing (the same songs), more dancing, more eating and more drinking. Some people again celebrated throughout the night, but I once again accepted an offer of a bed and a chance to sleep.

I thought the next morning would be a low key, sober end to proceedings – but realised I was probably wrong when I was a woman preparing a large saucepan full of chang (home made millet beer) at 7:30 am. There was another feeding and more of the kind of carousing I was becoming used to. I could even join in on a few of the songs by this point.

When we left at 12:30 pm the party showed no signs of stopping, more than 48 hours since it commenced. I loved how easy-going everyone was. I didn't even know the families but nobody thought to question why I was there. Everyone and their whole family were there. Even the bride wore socks and sandals.

Wedding (pt. 1): Collecting your wife

2010-12-05T18:35:00.003+11:00

[note: now with photos! 13/12/10]

A Nepali wedding, like most things in Nepal is exuberant, has the appearance of being shambolic, involves a large, complex web of relatives and takes on an organic life of its own. I've split this post up over a couple of days, partly because there's so much to mention and partly because I'm still recovering.

The basic format of the wedding was like most in Nepal. First, the groom's family walk from his family's house to the bride's family's house. There is a ceremony and then they return to the groom's place, or a party destination, to celebrate. As it was a country wedding, the walk from the groom's village to the bride's was a 6 hour walk up and down hills and the whole wedding went for two and a half days.

We joined the celebrations as the groom's party passed through our village at 4:30 in the afternoon. It was quite easy to tell when they arrived given they came with their own processional band:

There is nothing quite like a Nepali band. Comprising of a variety of woodwind instruments and percussion the noise is distinct. To the Western ear here is something distinctly atonal about the melodies – which meander around to a never-ending improvised tune. The party had left at 11 am that day, and there was much drinking and merriment along the way:

That guy clearly isn't drinking Sprite... it's like the guys hold the buck's party on the way to the wedding.

And so we set off with them. There was something distinctly magical about walking along the edges of terraced mountains as the sun set and the band played on.

The descent into the bride's village is one I've made before – it's steep, and the stairs are small and prone to slipperiness. Factor in that the sun had just gone down at there were few flashlights and it actually became a rather stressful walk. People who know me well know that I'm not great with stair-based situations (which is, of course, why I work in Nepal) and while I've gotten better negotiating paths around here this was particularly stressful. It amazed me that people were capable at negotiating the path and they weren't even sober.

We arrived at the bride's village at 6 pm. Several of the terraces had been given over to a massive mass-dining area, where people lined up and were fed in batches from giant pots. The process went on for over an hour, and was repeated again the next morning by the bride's family and again that evening and the following day by the groom's. I was surprised that I flummoxed them by not eating meat. It appeared that I was the only vegetarian among 300 Buddhist guests – but thankfully someone rustled up some daal for me. This was repeated for every meal for the rest of the wedding, and most people were mystified by my strange dietary preference. Most people here can't afford to eat meat more often than once a week or fortnight, so to pass up the rare opportunity seemed to them a folly.

While we were eating there were some formalities that were taking place. The groom and his family entered the bride's house, where the local Lama was waiting to bless them all. This happened again at the groom's house, and I got to watch that time. It appeared, on the whole, that these proceedings weren't actually that important to anyone but the immediate family and everyone else was much more interested in eating, dancing, singing and drinking.

Which is what we busied ourselves with too. Impromptu groups of singers would strike up a tune, and happily sing along to the same song for up to an hour. Some men and women would get up to dance, and they received money from the other guests. I'm not sure what the money was for, or where it went.

A friend had found a place for me to sleep, and given that there were several hundred people and not many beds I took the offer gratefully. I fell asleep to the sound of singing, and woke up throughout the night as singing gave way to drunken singing and then was joined by the crowing of roosters. They had partied all night and when I woke at 6 am some were drinking morning tea while others were starting the morning with more home-distilled alcohol.

We sat around, sang some more, visited friends in neighbouring houses, ate once again at the mass serving area and then took our leave ahead of the main party. They would catch us up in our village on their way back to the groom's house, but the kids needed to be sent to school and some of us needed a nap.

While that would be the end of a great party at home, it was only the first half of proceedings. The wife still needed to be taken to her new house, which will form the second part of the story tomorrow.

Two weeks, 75 emails...

2010-11-26T17:32:00.005+11:00

Not to mention the 352 unread items in my RSS reader, and the fact that the internet in the town I'm in is like something from the mid-ninties...

I'm currently in a larg-ish town near the villagee for a couple of weeks to work with some other speakers, and enjoy things like plumbing, personal space and food that isn't daal and rice.

Although I've just settled in here, I'm back to the villages in a couple of days for a wedding. It's a tough life, but someone's got to enjoy all that singing, eating and dancing.

Cheese cheese cheese cheese cheese

2010-11-13T16:32:00.003+11:00

This morning I decided to throw in the transcribing of stories for a couple of hours and stroll over to a farmers market I'd seen advertised in one of my favourite cafes.

It turned out to be a goldmine of foods that I've been missing from home. As you may have guessed from reading the title to this post there was cheese! Mozzarella, feta and some rad pungent French-style stuff. There was also cake that tasted like cake, and bread that looked like bread. And avocado. The only things missing from my list of food stuffs I regularly day dream about were Portuguese tarts, cherries and decent ice cream. But it was more than exciting enough as it was.

I know where I'll be every Saturday that I'm in Kathmandu.

Back to the village

2010-11-13T00:02:00.003+11:00

My return to Kathmandu has been but a brief visit to organise myself for a longer stint in the country. The harvest season is upon us, and in a few weeks most of my village-side Tam speaking friends will be up to their elbows in rice fields. So I leave again on Sunday for what will be a couple of weeks in the village and a couple more in the nearest town, where the amenities aren't much better and there are more noisy vehicles around to boot.

This means that tomorrow, as well as packing in as much work as possible, I'll also be packing bags and making the most of all the things that I can't do outside Kathmandu. So hopefully I'll have time to eat a salad, hang out on g-chat, get a massage, speak some English, have a glass of wine (or two) and sleep in a bed that's actually long enough for me. It promises to be a great day!

The lack of readily available internet also means I obviously won't be posting quite so much. But don't worry, I'll be well looked after and sufficiently over-fed and will be back with lots of amusing and bemusing stories in a couple of weeks!

A Nepali Picnic

2010-11-11T21:33:00.005+11:00

Today I took a break from study, having been invited by a friend to attend a picnic. This friend runs a school for kids who are at risk of dropping out of society. It's a small school where children are socialised into education before the organisation supports them in mainstream education.

The 18 or so kids were all excited to be having an excursion, which was in a small park a short bus ride from the Kathmandu. It was, in many regards, like most other picnics I've been on. Excited children, games, a quiet-ish park. But when it comes to catering Nepalis do picnics like no one else.

Basically, the picnic involved bringing the kitchen along - including two gas cookers and a large gas bottle. At one point there were no fewer than 6 of us preparing food:

It was rice and curry - but being a picnic there were lots of exotic ingredients that aren't in the usual meal; tofu, mushrooms, egg, sweet curd. It was truly a sight to behold, and has certainly set the benchmark rather high for future al fresco eating.

Weather I'm here or at home...

2010-11-09T13:02:00.002+11:00

...it doesn't matter today. Both Kathmandu and Melbourne have an expected top of 28 degrees.

So we've finally reached the point where Melbourne's summer is kicking into gear, and the days here are slowly getting cooler (the nights are getting cooler rather rapidly).

One good thing about the cooling weather here is that it's not accompanied by cloudiness of a winter at home. It's still lovely and sunny!

Tihar: Sel Roti

2010-11-08T11:05:00.004+11:00

The last few days have been full of candles, marigolds, fireworks, singing in the street and food. You can see lots of pretty photos of those first few things at my friend Amos' blog here and http://www.consonantaspirations.com/2010/11/more-rangoli.html, so I thought I'd let you know about Tihar food. I know this is supposed to be a linguistics blog and not a food blog - but after 3 days of continuous eating food has been somewhat at the forefront of our attention.

Tihar is a very positive festival, and part of that is you eat lots of luxury food to celebrate - amongst other things - Laxmi, goddess of wealth, and cows, the sacred animals of Hindu. So there's lots of dried fruit, nuts, curd, fresh fruit, meat and all those things that are a bit too expensive to eat too much of most of the year.

Another thing that's eaten this time of year is Sel Roti, which is something like a doughnut, but less fluffy. They're deep-fried rings of sweet bread made from rice, and this year I got to watch my friends making them. I took enough photos to be able to bring the Sel making experience to you guys as well - but be warned, you might find them slightly less appealing after reading this!

SEL ROTI

Ingredients:

3 kg of uncooked rice, soaked overnight in water
1/2 kg sugar
1 lt liquid ghee
6-8 cups plain wheat flour

step one:

blend up the rice, ghee and sugar in small batches. Doesn't that look yummy already?

step two:

blend in the flour, you may need to feed small batches back in to the blender. Do this until you have the right consistence - something that will still flow but isn't too liquid.

step three:

Fry! To get the attractive ring shape one must have the batter at the right consistency, then swirl it around deftly into the bubbling oil.

Repeat, more than a few times, and there's your Sel:

Those white dots are grains of sugar that have come in contact with the oil, and give a crunchy counterbalance to the smoothly blended rice dough. Those who cook might have noticed that 3 kg of rice is a lot of base ingredient to start with, and you'd be right. All up our friends made around 100-150 Sel, which took about 3-4 hours just for the frying alone, and this in a small household. It gives you an idea of just how much eating goes on here over Tihar!

Lucking out, pt. 2

2010-11-06T11:30:00.005+11:00

A few days ago I mentioned a conversation with friends where we had been divided as to whether 'luck out' was a good or bad thing.

The results beyond out little lunch time gathering were just as mixed - so we're definitely not the only people who are likely to have this argument. Urban Dictionary, that most authoritative of lexicographic tools, argues that the 'luck out' divide is one between US and UK English, with it being used positively in the US and negatively in the UK. My pitifully small sample number of approximately 1.5 UK English speakers and 0.5 US English speakers would appear to conform to this analysis, but those numbers are much too low for me to throw my opinion behind.

Looking very quickly at a comparison between newspapers from different countries. Note, I took a wild guess this would be the most common form used in news reports and didn't bother searching variants like 'lucking out.' The New York Times up to 2007 had 326 references for 'lucked out', The Independent (UK) had 19 references since 1994 and for an Australian angle The Age had 44 search items with 'lucked out' since 1995. I'd love to spend all day going through the clippings, and tallying which sense is used where, and the oldest reported uses etc, but work calls . With only a quick flick it looks like the NYT references are all using the positive sense. the Independent also mostly uses the positive sence but the term mostly crops up in American references and quotes, such as this article on US beaknik Sarah Jepp:

but despite having "lucked-out" with an inexpensive room on the Venice Canals, L.A's vacuous side was beginning to grate.

I'm not sure if a more colloquial UK newspaper would have given a different result, but I'm not plunging into an archive of The Sun this early in the morning.

In The Age there are a mixture of usages, much like our small Australian contingent at the lunch table showed mixed attitudes to the meaning of 'luck out.' This rather pointless article about a pampered dog (From Zero to Hero, 22/05/95) uses the positive sense:

MAX, the five-year-old chihuahua, started life as a pet shop boy. For three weeks, his owner-to-be visited the pet shop almost every day, eyeing this sweet little fur ball all alone in a cage. At the end of three weeks, Jean Pierre Heurteau could resist no longer, so he bought Max and home they went. Max didn't realise it then but he had lucked out he was to start a lifestyle to die for.

While this article on seafood (From the deep 01/07/03) uses the other sense:

"I marinated pieces of the squid in seven different marinades for 12 hours and 24 hours to disguise the flavour, yet this made things little better.

"It's safe to say it won't be appearing on our menu," says Kerry.

Munro is mortified and suggests Kerry must have lucked out with the samples he supplied, but if you're a chef, supply-chain failures in the quality of the product cut little mustard.

You won't find lucked on in Merriam-Webster online. But it does occour in the Oxford English, although, interestingly, only the positive sense, which they site as a US term:

e. to luck out (U.S.), to achieve success or advantage by good luck in a difficult, testing, or dangerous situation.

In the last post, I withheld my own opinion on the matter so as to not bias the conversation. In the interest of full disclosure, I only ever use 'luck out' as a negative thing. If you lucked out things certainly didn't go your way.

Lucking Out

2010-11-06T03:29:00.003+11:00

Tihar continues unabated - I'll give a run-down later, but at the moment I'm stuffed and suffering from sel roti overdose. Also, I have a question I need your help with!

Over lunch with a few friend the other day it transpired there were two very different opinions about the meaning of the term 'lucked out' that divided the group. Half of us firmly believe that it is a good thing to luck out, while the other half thought that it was a very bad thing to luck out.

I won't tell you yet which group I fell into, because I'd like your opinion first. Let me know via email, or in the comments below and I'll do some dictionary digging as well as some scouring of the web and see what I can come up with.

Tihar

2010-11-05T10:58:00.002+11:00

We're right in the middle of Tihar, the Hindu festival of light - also known in some other countries as Dipawali - and one of my favourite times to be in Kathmandu.

Unlike Dasain there's no sacrifices to be seen. The last two days have been celebrating crow (messenger of death) and dog (loyal friend and guide after death) worship respectively. Today is worship for both the cow (sacred animal in hinduism) and Laxmi (goddess of wealth). Today we're going to a friend's house to help in a ceremony to welcome Laxmi (and her wealth generating powers) into the house. Conveniently, at various points this includes eating lots of yummy food and lighting lots of candles. Tomorrow will be Bhai tika day (brother tika), where the whole family gather, eat more yummy food, and honour their siblings by painting multicoloured tika on their forehead.

You may be thinking at this point, why am I always talking about celebrating Hindu festivals if I'm working on a language spoken by Buddhists? It's a good question, and there are a number of reasons. The first is that one of my closest Nepali friends is Hindu. The second is that everyone here is pretty chilled and most Buddhists will, to some extent, celebrate Tihar. The third is that Bhuddists have only one really big party festival, and that's Lhosar (new years) celebrated in February, which I'll also be around for, but it's still a little way off. And, finally, because Tihar is so much fun!

The top three problems with having pale skin on field work

2010-11-04T15:45:00.002+11:00

1. Sunburn. I now have a pretty brown patch on my back.

2. You can actually see how dirty you are. Enough said there.

3. Everyone can pick you for a foreigner a mile away.

My Husband

2010-11-03T15:13:00.002+11:00

Before I keep talking about my village-side adventures there's someone I need to mention.

Much to the dismay of Nepalis, and my grandmother, I am a happily unmarried 25 year old woman. In Nepal this makes me rather old to be unmarried, while most of my friends my age here have kids in primary school. That's not to say I'm single either, the Handsome Pen pal, as well as being me favourite international correspondent, is also my long-time (and long-suffering) boyfriend.

This causes a bit of difficulty in Nepal, because here there's really only a binary difference between 'single' and 'married' - I once tried to explain to a shopkeeper that in Australia it's verycommon for people to live together without being married, and he asked if the government makse that hard for people. How do you begin to explain that the government actually make it easier by legislating for de facto relationships?

And so, to make life easier here, the handsome Pen pal very kindly masquerades as my Faux-Husband. I don't really feel too bad about lying because it means people don't think I'm single, or crazy. Also, as most of my lying is done in Nepali it doesn't feel as weird because more often than not I'm talking about my 'sriman' and not my 'husband'.

Of course, the standard question that comes after asking if you're married is to ask if you have kids. The answer, as it is to my nan is always 'later'.

Village Life

2010-11-02T11:53:00.002+11:00

The village I ended up staying in last week was not an exclusively Tam speaking village (of which there are five), but one of the local hub villages where there are a mix of languages spoken. The best way to describe village life is that it's like living in a medieval village, albeit one with mobile phones, solar panels and plastic thongs.

I stayed with a family, a woman my age with an 8 year old and a 4 year old. Most women my age tend to have a child or two, but I still find it rather alarming! The 5 year old is the grottiest person I've ever met - in only the way that a 4 year old boy who happens to live on a farm can be. What amazes me the most is how hard working people are, in ways that I've never known people to have to be. There's no plumbing so children are send on the down hill walk every morning to fetch water. People still cook over wood fires and most people (myself included) wear the same clothes every day for most of the week. It was certainly no luxury wilderness retreat!

Back in Kathmandu

2010-11-02T01:56:00.002+11:00

It's felt like an epic adventure, but I've only been away about 12 day!

I arrived back in Kathmandu this after noon, very tired and much much dirtier than you probably want to read about in a blog post. I've solved the second problem with what was probably one of the most satisfying hot showers of my life, and plan to solve the first one with an imminent sleep.

It has been a rather successful mini-adventure on many fronts, I'll let you know about it all over the next few days of posting.

A short adventure

2010-10-20T15:25:00.002+11:00

I'm heading off from Kathmandu tomorrow morning to spend a couple of weeks out in the villages where Tam is spoken. I'm looking forward to getting away from the Kathmandu smog and shaking up my routine a little.

I'll be back within two weeks. I've told myself that I need the first trip to be short, so that I can come back and take stock of what I need - but it's really so that I can be back here to catch up with friends and enjoy Tihar, the festival of light, in early November.

If I come across an internet cafe I'll post when I can, otherwise I'll see you all in a fortnight!

A little night music

2010-10-16T01:52:00.002+11:00

Friday night, the say before a festival and the locals are partying like it's a two day weekend (which it is!!). The intersection near my guesthouse has been closed and there's a concert going on.

It's nice working to the sounds of live Nepali pop - but hopefully they'll be very Nepali about the whole thing and not let it run too late, I'm even less of a party animal that usual while fieldworking!

KTM weather

2010-10-12T17:23:00.003+11:00

As well as being a great time of year for festivals, this is also my favourite few weeks of weather in Kathmandu. The nights are finally getting cool enough to think about using a blanket, but not so cold you don't want to get out of bed in the morning. The days are sunny and warm, and frequently the sky is getting clear enough for a good view of the mountains that hem the valley.

Combine this with Kathmandu emptying out for the festivities, and a few days without classes or elicitation sessions and even I'm feeling relaxed!

1000th word: It's something good!

2010-10-12T17:21:00.003+11:00

Ladies and Gents, it is an auspicious occasion indeed. After 13 months and many sessions, the thousandth word entered into the database is:

lála लाला (n.) - something or someone. N: केहि ; कोहि

Yup! Something was the 1000th word. It certainly won't be the last either.

Four weeks in...

2010-10-12T17:17:00.003+11:00

I arrived in Kathmandu exactly four weeks ago today. When you spend every day working with dated data files, and grant money requires you to track your daily spending it's never very easy to forget the date. So far the trip feels to be going at a good pace, it's certainly not dragging but I appear to be getting quite a bit of work done.

Today is also the last day of sessions I'll be doing with A. for the while. It's been a very productive month tying up lots of questions left over from last year (and raising a few more!). I've felt more relaxed this time, I'm sure having a schedule of things to do has made it much easier.

I'll be hanging out in Kathmandu to celebrate Dasain, then taking a quick trip for about 10-12 days to the country. This will give me a chance to sus things out for a longer trip, and clear my lungs of the KTM smog!

But before that I have a few days to chill out and enjoy the relative peacefulness that had descended on Kathmandu for the holiday season.

Dasain

2010-10-12T10:43:00.002+11:00

Dasain is definitely in the air.

Children are on holidays from school, the shopping areas are packed and the newspapers are full of articles about how people have lost the true meaning of the holiday now our lives are so full of meaningless junk (yes, it all sounds too familiar).

Dasain officially started last Thursday and is 15 days of the most important festivities in the Nepali Hindu calendar. Much like Lent and Christmas, for most people the earlier days of the festival aren't that important. The biggest day is the 10th day, where the elders of the family bestow tika (red colouring, rice and yoghurt) on the foreheads of the family. Everyone gets dressed up and eats lots. Fortuntely I've got a family or two to be adopted by for the festivities - and I've got some new threads to pick up as well.

The other important day is the 9th, and to a lesser extent the 8th. These are the most popular days of slaughter and sacrifice. Slaughter? I thought we were drawing parallels between Christmas and Dasain just moments ago. Well, the whole point of Dasain is to honour the Goddess Durga, who saved existence by defeating an evil demon disguised as a buffalo. To keep Durga happy for the year the family slaughter an animal and bless things with it - houses, cars, etc. The standard middle class procedure is for goat, but if you're poor it might be a chicken and large temples receive buffalo for slaughter. The animal is generally eaten by the family afterwards, think of it as killing your own Christmas turkey.

Most Buddhists (and myself) find the mass slaughter rather disturbing. Many of them will visit their local temples over the next few days to pray for the animals being killed. I, on the other hand, will not be visiting anywhere this Saturday.

Of course, the other reminder that it's Dasain is the goat being kept somewhere in the neighbourhood that woke me up early this morning with it's pitiful bleating - but I can hardly get too annoyed with it, I know it won't be around to keep me awake for too long.

New Language!

2010-10-11T01:56:00.002+11:00

Every linguist and their blog have been talking about the media attention regarding the newly discovered language Koro in India (see news article here).

It's great to see language documentation getting some press, even if it's a bit over the top - see Claire Bowen's or Mos's thoughts on the matter.

Lozguistics readers might be interested to know that the 'newly discovered' Koro is in the Tibeto-Burman family, just like Tam. And, just like Tam has only recently come to the attention of linguists.

Waiting...

2010-10-10T18:15:00.002+11:00

I'm sitting in the guesthouse garden waiting for my room to be cleaned. I'm sure I could be upset about the fact that it's 1 o'clock and I still can't get back in to my room, but the weather's so lovely today, and I've managed to clear out my inbox a bit so I guess it's not such a waste of a morning.

I've also managed to straighten out some of my tech problems this morning. This involved less technical brilliance on my behalf and more going to buy new gear. While I'm often heard to complain about Thamel and its tourist shops, they do come in handy sometimes!

Assult and Batteries

2010-10-10T01:47:00.003+11:00

This field trip I am being assaulted with a constant stream of small scale technological dramas. I'm not sure if this is some kind of karmic retribution for not having any problems on the last trip, but it's all rather frustrating.

There was the initial problem of having to bring the two lap tops. Not that it's really a problem, they stay here in KTM and I don't really have to lug them anywhere. It's just annoying that I have two computers that both do about 85-90% of what I want, and not 100%.

The second drama has been that it appears the power here has blown a couple of my smaller appliances. My wall adapter that serves as a charger for my phone, video camera, and iPod no longer appears to work, although I'm yet to try a power outlet outside of the guesthouse, so hopefully it's just this place that's the problem. This drama is easily solved as there are a few camera shops in Thamel so I'll just have to fork out some money and pay tourist dollar.

The annoying thing to have blown is the charger pack for my rechargeable batteries. I try to use rechargeable batteries to limit the number I go though - especially because it's not safe to leave them here for disposal and I have to lug them home. Now not only am I potentially stuck with a lot of unrechargable rechargables but I'll still have to buy disposables too.

The most annoying thing to date has been that the battery in my video camera has been beginning to play up. I thought this was just a problem I was having, given that it hasn't been used a lot in the last 9-10 months. According to the internet though, I am not alone when it comes to battery problems for this brand.

I'm not going to name names. I haven't bothered to spill brand names when things work so it's not fair for me to only give negative reviews of tech on this site. Suffice to say though that if you're ever looking for a simple to use video camera drop me a line and I might suggest a brand to not buy. Fortunately I have an older model where you can still access the battery pack. Even better, the pack can be replaced with disposables. Obviously this isn't an ideal situation, especially given the problem above, but it means the show can go on.

I don't want to be too optimistic and hope this is the end of the troubles, but I am glad that I'll hopefully sort most of them out before being much more isolated from the city!

Desh: A film review

2010-10-10T01:23:00.003+11:00

As promised, a review of this morning's cinematic entertainment. Although, to be fair, I do judge Nepali films on very different criteria to most other films. For example, the more ridiculous or inexplicable a plot point is the better. Need to move the film along? Suddenly the lead character has a little sister who dies a horrible death. Two characters make inadvertent but potentially lustful eye contact? Time for a song! Crazy dancing and multiple scenic locations for no narrative reason added for free.

My summary of the plot is potentially not very accurate, given my Nepali is not quite up to the more intricate parts of the film.

A young boy is traumatised when is father is killed at war (the death scene eerily reminiscent of early Monty Python, although I don't think it's a deliberate homage). It is his grandmother who leads the child to follow the way of the pen and not the sword (in some very transparent visual cues) and so he becomes a journalist (and thankfully we miss a large chunk in the middle of his life and find he has grown up to become Rajesh Hamal, god of Nepali cinema.

Now, I'm a little hazy here. It appears that he is a journalist, but he spends a lot of time hanging out with university students. I'm not sure if they're trying to pass an indeterminately middle aged man off as a university student but if they are then having him carry a leather satchel at all times (all times!!)is not very convincing.

Anyway, he hangs out with Uni students, who are all apathetic about Nepal and plan to go overseas to study. He incites some kind of national pride in them, but they get a little carried away and are misdirected by some villains (you can tell they're villains, their eyes are funny). The students incite a bandah (this is one of the more believable plot points).

The bandah is a success! But the younger sister of the main student leader is killed after they're unable to get her to a hospital because of said bandah. This is the price the student leader has paid for his misdirected enthusiasm! But it's ok, the journalist is here with some kind of dossier, which they use against the villains (what's in the dossier? I have no idea, but the over is red and has Ganesh on it...). The students become reporter to out the villains, and then like all good Nepalis, form a political party. At a massive rally for their new party Rajesh Hamal is shot in the stomach in as assassination plot. Does he go to hospital? No, he hides the wound with his ever present satchel until it's too late and his friends must leave him to fall over and die, but not before his nephew appears so he can pass on the pen to the future generation, thus ensuring his legacy, and violently collapsing about six seconds before the credits.

In between there's a love story, some dancing, and a boy sets an evil man on fire and kills him in retribution for the loss of his family and no one reports this matter to the authorities. It all makes perfect sense...

Check out the poster, and a music clip from the film here.

Morning Movies

2010-10-09T11:12:00.001+11:00

Only in Nepal is it considered completely normal to arrange to go to the cinema for an 8 am screening. Not sure what we're seeing but I'll be sure to give you a review this afternoon!

959

2010-10-08T00:05:00.001+11:00

That is the number of entries I currently have in my Tam lexicon!

So in the next couple of weeks, with the rate I'm collecting data, we should hit 1000 individual words in the lexicon (not including personal names, village names and some borrowed terms). What will it be? Hopefully something amusing! Stay tuned and I'll let you know when it happens!

Relatively excited

2010-10-06T16:14:00.003+11:00

I'm rather excited after today's session because during an elicitation task A. produced some awesome, spontaneous relative clauses. A relative clause in English would be something like:

The man who is wearing glasses.

They're generally hard enough to elicit in forced constructions, and it's not often you get some good, clear natural examples. Today we were working through some video stimulus created by the rad people at MPI, which had about 60 short videos of people 'putting' - putting hats on heads, water in cups, books on shelves, napkins in exhaust pipes, apples in socks... all a bit strange but a nice break from the usual routine.

A. used some great relative clauses to describe some of the people - including the man who is wearing glasses that I described above. Although, it probably translates better from Tam to say something like 'the glasses wearing man'.

Yup, I know, probably not much to get excited about you might think - but then it doesn't take much to make a session satisfactory!

Half way throught the week...

2010-10-06T14:27:00.002+11:00

In trying to be positive about the 6 day working week in Nepal, the only thing I can come up with is that half way thought the week happens on a Tuesday night, a whole half day earlier than for you five days a week lot.

Not only am I comfortably transitioned to the second half of the week, but I'm beginning to transition to the second phase of my field work... I'm almost wound down asking questions about things I had to chase up from last trip. That's not to say I now understand things perfectly, I'm just moving on to more naturalistic narratives, conversations and things like that - certainly makes a nice change!

Speechless

2010-10-03T21:53:00.004+11:00

In the battle between the Kathmandu pollution and my airways the coarse unrefined smog that passes for breathable atmosphere has finally won out, and I have been left a coughing, spluttering, voiceless mess.

Am really looking forward to a visit to the countryside in a couple of weeks!

New Month

2010-10-01T20:41:00.002+10:00

Happy October!

I've found today's date extra amusing for data collection...

Every day when I record I upload these recordings to my computer. There I keep track of all the meta data (date, place, speakers, content - all very important stuff).

One very important thing with lots of files is keeping naming conventions consistent. My system is to put the date, backwards to keep everything in order, and the file number, because often I'll make more than one recording across a day. And so perhaps now you know why I'm so amused by today. Yup, doesn't take much to keep me amused - the first file recorded today I got to name:

101001-01

Am also greatly looking forward to Sunday week...

Butter the devil you know

2010-09-30T21:23:00.005+10:00

I should say, in all fairness, that by and large I love the food in Nepal. Sure, for most people it's daal, vege curry and rice twice a day - but as a vegetarian I'm certainly not complaining about that. Being culinarily compatible with your field site is a rather important part of feeling comfortable on field work. I could never work where my friend Mos works; where fried pig fat is a local delicacy. Nor do I have the fortitude to live where another fiend of mine works, where she describes one menu item as, and I hope she won't mind me quoting her, "a rat with an extra long nose and a plate full of slimy spinach."

So by and large, Nepali food is tasty and they're very much on board with the whole vegetarian thing. But there is one foodstuff that I can't cope with very well - butter tea.

Butter tea is a traditional Tibetan style drink popular among many of the hill dwelling culturally Tibetan people of Nepal. It involves blending milk and butter and salt and then serving it hot from a giant thermos. Originally the blending occurred in a giant wooden churn and a woman's domestic skills were judged on how well she made tea (a rather physical job) while now the hard work in most urban families is left to an electric blender.

The tea is rich, almost like a savory broth. I could cope with one cup perhaps, but the customary practice is to keep the small cup permanently brim-full.

Fortunately butter tea is something of a special delicacy, so it's not served too often. Although it means that when it is I'm rather obliged to partake. At least while I'm drinking I can console myself with the knowledge it's made from neither pork fat or rat.

Traffic jams in Kathmandu...

2010-09-30T13:32:00.003+10:00

...even the cows have to queue.

Going Native

2010-09-28T13:05:00.002+10:00

One thing I love about Nepal is that many of the women wear these bright beautiful kurta surwals.

While last trip I wore long skirts and tshirts this time I decided to get in on the KS action. To westerners they look a little like pyjamas - in fact, I have a pair back home that I use for that purpose. Not only do they look like pyjamas, but they're as comfortable. And you get to wear them all day. And you get them made for you individually. I'm not sure what's to love about them.

So I got some made, but I've been a bit wary about finally heading out in public. I'm not sure why I should worry about being stared at, it happens enough anyway, what with me being a tall, pasty, pale-haired freak (I've had 3 conversations in the last 2 days about how tall I am...). Maybe I've just been worried that wearing a KS would push me even further towards being a freak instead of redeeming me.

But so far today it's been ok. There's been some amusement among the guesthouse staff, but A. gave me the thumbs up so I feel more comfortable already.

A suddenly peaceful day

2010-09-26T13:53:00.002+10:00

I've been getting back into the swing of sessions - and the data crunching that comes with them.

Today I was supposed to meet with another speaker that L. had met - I'm beginning to be convinced that L. really does know everyone in Nepal.

Anyway, so I had time today to digest all the data from working with both A. and the new woman I only did a little bit of work with A. this morning. When I got back to my guest house I found L. there, waiting to tell me that the new woman was too busy to come today. So now I only have a fraction of the usual work to do... I think some leisurely afternoon reading is in order!

A new house, a new baby, and the second time around...

2010-09-21T20:09:00.002+10:00

In discussions with seasoned fieldworks prior to my departure, many of them spoke enthusiastically about the second time around. People are glad to see you, you all know what the procedure is and you're all a lot more comfortable. After catching up this morning with my friend and main teacher of Tam it's my turn to also do the same!

Things didn't get off to a great start - but then anything involving me, Nepali and a phone rarely does. This became apparent after I organised to meet her at her house and then found out that she no longer lived there! But the old man who sits out the front to read the newspaper every morning was there and he kindly offered to take me to A.'s new place ("It'll be good for my karma," he said) and we took a scenic detour via the river to throw in the trash.

A.'s new place is rather nice. There's running water and more secure doors. After clearly up the initial confusion (I was supposed to ring her at the old house to collect me) we spent the morning catching up, working our way though each others' respective families, swapping stories. Her daughter is pregnant and due in December so that was exciting news.

I gave A. a draft of the dictionary of Tam that I've been tinkering with - and the whole family were gathered 'round. Not only is she glad to have it, but she said she'd make not of any errors, which will help no end!

And so after almost a week of reading, relaxing and generally not doing much it's time to get down to work. I'm actually looking forward to it - and now I took can talk about how much easier it feels second time around!

5 must have items

2010-09-19T10:24:00.003+10:00

If I had to describe my personal packing style I would say that I am generally a minimalist - always choosing the convenience of a small pack or suitcase over preparing for all eventualities. I say 'always', but that's clearly not the case when it comes to fieldwork trips. Although I brought a minimum of clothes and not even a second pair of shoes, I managed to almost exceed the baggage limit again on this trip. Bags full of computers, gadgets, gifts, and of course noteboooks.

However, for the mountains of stuff I brought with me, here is my list of 5 things that I can not live without here:

1. Water purifying UV light: It's like something straight out of Sci-Fi; think sonic screw-driver but with only one of the functions. I spend so much time here being careful about what I eat/drink that if I were anywhere else you'd think it were a phobia - but in Nepal stomach upsets and much worse are a daily reality. Unfortunately, the water in the guesthouse rooms is not physically clean enough to drink (the light is great, but no defense against floaties) - however I'm ready and armed for the countryside!

2. Nail brush: one of the most contented parts of my day is filling a bucket with hot water and scrubbing Kathmandu off my feet.

3. The pink pencil: I'm not normally one for superstition and such - but I have a pink mechanical pencil that I used every day of the previous field trip, and have with me again. It's nice to have something so familiar to write down so much unfamiliar language with.

4. Skype: Ok, so I didn't really bring it with me, but I am officially now a massive fan of Skype. It's so much better than phone calls for the basic fact that silences aren't awkward - you can just wave at each other. And what's the use in having a Handsome Penpal if you can't see his Handsome face from time to time?

5. Laptop: it's a bit of an obvious one, but in many ways my laptop is like an electronic umbilical back to my other life. It's full of movies, songs and photos. Not to mention I can use it to Skype and internet. Oh... and do my work... It lets me be much more on top of data processing than I would be if I left it at home and just came back with a pile of tapes/CDs/SD cards.

Of course, one thing about Nepal is that there are lots of really great books here at really affordable prices - which is going to do nothing for my baggage weight management issues!

Cruisy times in Kathmandu

2010-09-17T17:32:00.000+10:00

I've settled in to being back in Nepal rather easily. It's less humid than I remember it being at this time of the year, but apart from that it's like I've never left.

My Nepali is getting a good airing and it's not as horrible as I thought it was. It's slowly coming back to me, although there are a lot of gaps still.

While it feels comfortable and familiar there's been something a bit weird about being here, and it took me all day yesterday to figure out what it is. Basically it feels weird to be hanging out in Kathmandu and not working. Normally in Kathmandu I feel a daily race against time to keep up with data collection and analysis. But at the moment I'm waiting a few days to acclimatise before getting back into work and it feels rather nice. But I guess in the long run there's only so much cafe-hopping and strolling that one can do. So I'll hopefully get stuck into work in a couple of days.