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| DEVANAGIRI ALPHABET |
The University of the Third Age in Edinburgh has a magazine, The Clarion, and the editor, Bruce Cowan, is calling for articles either on My Hero/Heroin or Languages.
So this is it, my short essay on the Nepali language.
I remember clearly a
programme I was watching on TV in the 70s.
The living goddess Kumari was being paraded through the streets of
Kathmandu. Nepal in those days was still
emerging from the cultural heritage of the 18th century; and to see
a young, pre-pubescent girl deified as a virgin goddess and being worshiped was
really, for me, beyond the wildest dreams
of Kew..the facts of Kathmandu.
In the late seventies I had the chance to work
as a volunteer in Birganj, a busy, bustling town on the border with India,
unbearably hot in the summer months and sub-tropical in the winter.
Outside of the confines of the campus where I
taught post-graduate students the art of teaching English, there was very
little opportunity to communicate with the locals except in their own language,
Nepali. So I ventured out onto the
streets and the bazaar and learned a kind of bastardised version of the
language, a mixture really of Hindi, Bhojpuri and Nepali.
Only when on leave in Kathmandu six months
after the beginning of my sojourn did I discover from a local shopkeeper that
my language was a mish mash of the
local tongues in Birganj: Thas no Nepali, he told me, thas all mix up mix up.
But the real faux pas happened when I returned to the classroom and decided to show off my skill in the local language with my students. You must learn English, I instructed them, little realising that the transposition of the first letter of the verb to learn had metamorphosed my meaning to You must fornicate with the English, but in a much less formal context.
While I continued to wonder why the students were laughing at me throughout the lesson , my mistake was discreetly pointed out to me by a sympathetic student at the end of the session.
Altogether, I was there for two and a half
years and enjoyed trekking to remote areas and villages. Slowly, the language barriers fell and the
simplified speech of the locals made it easy for me to communicate as little
use was made of tenses and gender.
Did I enjoy the experience of learning a
foreign language? Well, I went on to do
a post-graduate scholarship course in Nepalese culture with my Guru, Professor
Chudamani Bhandu, a lexicographer, from whom I learned there are 122 languages –
not dialects – spoken in Nepal as the mother tongue. Most of the students I was teaching were at least
tri-lingual and I can only say I was relieved to know that Nepali or
Gorkhali as it is also known is the
official language of the country.
But my time in the Department of Culture at
Kirtipur Campus in Kathmandu was not wasted as I went on to translate Laxmi
Prasad Devkota’s poetry who is considered to be the bard.
I have been back to the country many times and
find that I can still communicate with the locals. I’ve tried my hand at other European languages
but for some reason in France they think I’m German and in Germany they think I’m
French – oh, and they don’t understand a word I say.
The main things I’ve found out about learning a
foreign language are start young, start with the skills of listening and
talking and live in the country.
