Holiday reading
I ended the year reading Spoken Here by Mark Abley.
It was heavier going than I expected, I started reading it on the way to the airport in Hong Kong and only finished it on the way back from Bali.
Basically, the book is about the author's travels to document some of the world's most endangered languages and the efforts that are being made to preserve and/or revive them. It is perhaps, in a way, an implicit criticism of globalisation and how English is taking over the world. This results in languages / dialects being lost as the younger generation doesn't see the economic value in making the effort to learn them. This is exacerbated by the attitude that some governments and/or their parents have as well, which results in the lack of funding for language facilities and generally influences the parents against teaching their children to speak the dialect / language.
Personally, I related to this book on many levels. In the last few years, I have been making a subconscious and eventually conscious effort to work on my mandarin and my dialects. Having moved to HK, I am forcing myself to learn Cantonese and the intention is to attend structured Cantonese classes after CNY. Another level which I relate to the book is how living in Singapore, this results in a person picking and choosing various words from a different language that perfectly expresses an emotion or feeling. In his book, Mark Abley talks about the following words in the Boro language / dialect (Indian):
1. Onguboy: To love from the heart
2. Onsay: To pretend to love
3. Onsra: to love for the last time.
He then goes on to say:
"Words like these go beyond all borders: the ideas or sentiments they express transcend the culture that articulates them. I can't imagine I will ever need to express the noise that mud and water would make if I refused to let a sleeping crab lie; as far as I'm concerned, zogno is a word that can happily stay in Boro. While I love the surprising verb dasa - it means "not to place a fishing instrument" - I accept, with some reluctance that my own language might have little use for it. But onsay and onsra are a different story. Having met those words in Dr Bhattacharya's book, how can I do without them? I cove them, just as I covet the verbs for expressing anger by a sidelong glance or for feeling partly bitter. They are more than just fresh sounds on the tongue; they are fresh thoughts in the mind."
And this is one of the reasons why I do like being exposed to different languages, I understand the feeling of stumbling upon a word, learning its meaning, coveting it and making it mine by daily usage. It results in me speaking a hodgepodge of impure English (sometimes known as Singlish) but it is those un-English words that captures the moment / feeling / emotion perfectly.
In the end, I really enjoyed this book. I took down quotes, scribbled notes next to the poolside in Bali, thought about the material and even ended up having a fairly interesting discussion about the ideas set out in the book with M over beer last night. It was a nice book to end the year with and in an odd way perhaps captured my thoughts about the challenges that I have faced in the last six months quite well.
Then 2009 came around and I kicked off the year with something lighter - Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I read his short story The Witch's Headstone in another book and I thought it was the best of the collection. This time he expanded that short story into a collection of stories about a boy called Bod (short for Nobody) who grows up in a graveyard due to the murder of his family. Bod triumphs in the end in finding his family's murderer, he grows up to leave the graveyard to see the world and the book ends with this rather cheesy ditty:
"Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you'll see the world
If I'm not mistaken ...
Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure...
Face your life
Its pain, its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken."
Nevertheless, I thought it sums up the attitude that I should take to face this year. I know it won't be perfectly smooth but that is life, where the pain must be taken with the pleasure. And as far as possible, I hope that I can say I faced life and left no path untaken.
It was heavier going than I expected, I started reading it on the way to the airport in Hong Kong and only finished it on the way back from Bali.
Basically, the book is about the author's travels to document some of the world's most endangered languages and the efforts that are being made to preserve and/or revive them. It is perhaps, in a way, an implicit criticism of globalisation and how English is taking over the world. This results in languages / dialects being lost as the younger generation doesn't see the economic value in making the effort to learn them. This is exacerbated by the attitude that some governments and/or their parents have as well, which results in the lack of funding for language facilities and generally influences the parents against teaching their children to speak the dialect / language.
Personally, I related to this book on many levels. In the last few years, I have been making a subconscious and eventually conscious effort to work on my mandarin and my dialects. Having moved to HK, I am forcing myself to learn Cantonese and the intention is to attend structured Cantonese classes after CNY. Another level which I relate to the book is how living in Singapore, this results in a person picking and choosing various words from a different language that perfectly expresses an emotion or feeling. In his book, Mark Abley talks about the following words in the Boro language / dialect (Indian):
1. Onguboy: To love from the heart
2. Onsay: To pretend to love
3. Onsra: to love for the last time.
He then goes on to say:
"Words like these go beyond all borders: the ideas or sentiments they express transcend the culture that articulates them. I can't imagine I will ever need to express the noise that mud and water would make if I refused to let a sleeping crab lie; as far as I'm concerned, zogno is a word that can happily stay in Boro. While I love the surprising verb dasa - it means "not to place a fishing instrument" - I accept, with some reluctance that my own language might have little use for it. But onsay and onsra are a different story. Having met those words in Dr Bhattacharya's book, how can I do without them? I cove them, just as I covet the verbs for expressing anger by a sidelong glance or for feeling partly bitter. They are more than just fresh sounds on the tongue; they are fresh thoughts in the mind."
And this is one of the reasons why I do like being exposed to different languages, I understand the feeling of stumbling upon a word, learning its meaning, coveting it and making it mine by daily usage. It results in me speaking a hodgepodge of impure English (sometimes known as Singlish) but it is those un-English words that captures the moment / feeling / emotion perfectly.
In the end, I really enjoyed this book. I took down quotes, scribbled notes next to the poolside in Bali, thought about the material and even ended up having a fairly interesting discussion about the ideas set out in the book with M over beer last night. It was a nice book to end the year with and in an odd way perhaps captured my thoughts about the challenges that I have faced in the last six months quite well.
Then 2009 came around and I kicked off the year with something lighter - Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. I read his short story The Witch's Headstone in another book and I thought it was the best of the collection. This time he expanded that short story into a collection of stories about a boy called Bod (short for Nobody) who grows up in a graveyard due to the murder of his family. Bod triumphs in the end in finding his family's murderer, he grows up to leave the graveyard to see the world and the book ends with this rather cheesy ditty:
"Sleep my little baby-oh
Sleep until you waken
When you wake you'll see the world
If I'm not mistaken ...
Kiss a lover
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure...
Face your life
Its pain, its pleasure,
Leave no path untaken."
Nevertheless, I thought it sums up the attitude that I should take to face this year. I know it won't be perfectly smooth but that is life, where the pain must be taken with the pleasure. And as far as possible, I hope that I can say I faced life and left no path untaken.