Languages fascinate me!
Oh, by the way, this is a 12+ and a ‘prude-minus’ blog. Read this only if you are above 12 and not a prude.
So, languages fascinate me. The syntax, grammar, the special characters (or the missing characters) in some languages, the whole thing is very interesting.
Syntax and Grammar: For example if I have to translate “Kahan Ja Raha Hai?” in English word for word in the same order, it would be something like, “Where going are?” And the ‘you’, which is redundant in Hindi is not so in English. The gender is determined by the ‘Raha’ or ‘Rahi’ in Hindi, whereas with the question, ‘Where are you going?’ it is impossible to determine the gender.
Missing Characters: The letter P does not exist in Arabic. They use B in place of P. So Pepsi is written as Bibsi in Arabic. Similarly, the letter H is missing in Tamil and they use G instead. So Mahesh is Magesh. The flip side is that these are additional letters in English over these languages. Likewise, there are some letters missing in English found in other languages like Urdu, Sindhi, Marathi, Malayalam, etc.
Anyway, the main theme of this blog is how the same word means different things in different languages (or jargon). And here is where the 12+ and ‘prude-minus’ begins.
Talk to a Punjabi or a Sindhi and he will smirk knowingly when you mention the word Gui because it means ‘butt’ in vernacular slang. But speak to an IT guy and he will think of it as GUI, which stands for ‘Graphical User Interface’.
Also, wrt the title of the blog, ‘Susu’ in Malay (yes, fresh knowledge after my visit to Malaysia) means, hold your breath, ‘milk’. So a glass of Susu means a glass of milk.
Also, fuck (or a different spelling of it) in Sindhi means taking medicine. So when I say ‘Gory fuck’ in Sindhi, it means ‘Take the tablet’. And I don’t even need to translate what it means in English.
Similarly, ‘fakta’ in Marathi, which means a hramless ‘only’, sounds dangerously close to ‘Fuck the’ in English. It is a very popular anecdote that an Air Hostess had once asked Sharad Pawar if he wanted Chicken with Rice or Roti and he had said ‘Fakta Chicken’, which the Air Hostess took serious offence to thinking that Sharad Pawar had mouthed the obscenity.
I will drink to that. Susu anyone?
By Sunil @ 12:06 am