when I thank him: "You should say
shukriya.
" I'm momentarily confused.
Dhan-yavaad,
what I'd said, is perfectly fine in every "Speak Hindi" book, but then I realize: he's Muslim. I'd used the word from the Sanskrit. He's insisting on the Arabic-based one. All year, every time I give thanks, I end up putting someone off.
A block from the Chandra Prakash, on the corner by the Titanic Travel Agency, I manage by the determined unfocusing of my eyes to avoid the attentions of the overwrought cybercafe owner who wears a zoot suit. He has a business proposition he wants to discuss. I can scientifically guess what it is: I should come to his place only. I'm worn-out from his other business proposals, sympathetic nonetheless. There's a drought on, all the tourists have vanished, the merchants are desperate or dulled.
I pass an elephant standing on breakfast, curling sweet-smelling chickpea greens up in his trunk. A round old lady, head hennaed a silly orange, pulls a little girl across the street. Four old men in red and purple turbans lounge at a table, watching me,
videshi
television, foreigner TV, and that's it for the block. Even when you turn a corner and suddenly encounter a crowd here, it's never the full-press crush of people in Benares or Calcutta.
At Renee's, she yells, "It's open," when I knock. "Almost ready," she calls from her bedroom. "Just using your bathroom," I say in reply. What I'm after is her scale. The needle shows another pound gone. I'm down six, the Jain vegetarian miracle diet. Sometimes I stop by after school just to check. The count is compelling, proof of what I suspect: I'm no longer physically quite myself. These days, my hair looks electrocuted no matter how much conditioner I apply, a mystery that won't be resolved for months, till Helaena says, "Oh, no, you've been using the green shampoo? Oh, God, you want the red. The green strips your hair. It's made to take out coconut oil." My hair, still light brown from the American summer, is going dark at the roots from the blasting sun here, from the need to keep my head covered. My feet are cracked: constant exposure in sandals. My English is somewhat, too. A weird crossover effect from my studies has occurred. Hindi pollutes my English and vice versa. I construct clunky Hindi sentences using English syntax; total groaners, all wrong. The courtly politeness of Hindi filters into my English, "by your kindness," "I am obliged to your honor." It leeches my American personality, makes me feel I've gone pale. I never realized before the extent to which we reside in language. We are how we speak.
The way I speak, my pronunciation, is sometimes different now. Just as the formalities of Hindi have begun to appear in my English unwanted, unexpectedly, when I go to phone home. I open my mouth and notice that my vowels are tighter, the start of an Indian accent. It's odd, automatic, like spirit possession. It brings to mind a remark the linguist Jenny Saffran made during a discussion we had of how first and second languages most likely share the same neural systems, as opposed to, say, being separately lodged in the brain. "There's evidence a second language begins to cannibalize your first," she said, a revolutionary rethinking of transfer.
Transfer, as it's been conceived for years, is the way a first language, an L1 in the vernacular, interferes with a second, an L2; the way you inevitably try to press foreign words on an English template and end up sounding like the local version of Peter Sellers on a roll. "Individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings ... of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture," the linguist Robert Lado writes. L1 imperialism, but just recently several researchers have observed transfer goes both ways.
A second language can, weirdly, start to revise the DNA of the first. The implications are rather remarkable: study French intensively enough, and you're no longer speaking the same English you were.
shukriya.
" I'm momentarily confused.
Dhan-yavaad,
what I'd said, is perfectly fine in every "Speak Hindi" book, but then I realize: he's Muslim. I'd used the word from the Sanskrit. He's insisting on the Arabic-based one. All year, every time I give thanks, I end up putting someone off.
A block from the Chandra Prakash, on the corner by the Titanic Travel Agency, I manage by the determined unfocusing of my eyes to avoid the attentions of the overwrought cybercafe owner who wears a zoot suit. He has a business proposition he wants to discuss. I can scientifically guess what it is: I should come to his place only. I'm worn-out from his other business proposals, sympathetic nonetheless. There's a drought on, all the tourists have vanished, the merchants are desperate or dulled.
I pass an elephant standing on breakfast, curling sweet-smelling chickpea greens up in his trunk. A round old lady, head hennaed a silly orange, pulls a little girl across the street. Four old men in red and purple turbans lounge at a table, watching me,
videshi
television, foreigner TV, and that's it for the block. Even when you turn a corner and suddenly encounter a crowd here, it's never the full-press crush of people in Benares or Calcutta.
At Renee's, she yells, "It's open," when I knock. "Almost ready," she calls from her bedroom. "Just using your bathroom," I say in reply. What I'm after is her scale. The needle shows another pound gone. I'm down six, the Jain vegetarian miracle diet. Sometimes I stop by after school just to check. The count is compelling, proof of what I suspect: I'm no longer physically quite myself. These days, my hair looks electrocuted no matter how much conditioner I apply, a mystery that won't be resolved for months, till Helaena says, "Oh, no, you've been using the green shampoo? Oh, God, you want the red. The green strips your hair. It's made to take out coconut oil." My hair, still light brown from the American summer, is going dark at the roots from the blasting sun here, from the need to keep my head covered. My feet are cracked: constant exposure in sandals. My English is somewhat, too. A weird crossover effect from my studies has occurred. Hindi pollutes my English and vice versa. I construct clunky Hindi sentences using English syntax; total groaners, all wrong. The courtly politeness of Hindi filters into my English, "by your kindness," "I am obliged to your honor." It leeches my American personality, makes me feel I've gone pale. I never realized before the extent to which we reside in language. We are how we speak.
The way I speak, my pronunciation, is sometimes different now. Just as the formalities of Hindi have begun to appear in my English unwanted, unexpectedly, when I go to phone home. I open my mouth and notice that my vowels are tighter, the start of an Indian accent. It's odd, automatic, like spirit possession. It brings to mind a remark the linguist Jenny Saffran made during a discussion we had of how first and second languages most likely share the same neural systems, as opposed to, say, being separately lodged in the brain. "There's evidence a second language begins to cannibalize your first," she said, a revolutionary rethinking of transfer.
Transfer, as it's been conceived for years, is the way a first language, an L1 in the vernacular, interferes with a second, an L2; the way you inevitably try to press foreign words on an English template and end up sounding like the local version of Peter Sellers on a roll. "Individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings ... of their native language and culture to the foreign language and culture," the linguist Robert Lado writes. L1 imperialism, but just recently several researchers have observed transfer goes both ways.
A second language can, weirdly, start to revise the DNA of the first. The implications are rather remarkable: study French intensively enough, and you're no longer speaking the same English you were.
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