(no subject)
I once got in trouble with a roommate for referring to Italian as "degenerate Latin." I was kidding, mostly (disclaimer: I briefly flirted with the idea of majoring in Classics), but what bothered him about my statement was the primacy it ascribed to certain forms of language. It's true that modern Italian languages descend from "vulgar" (i.e. people's) Latin, as opposed to the educated classes' literary idiom of Cicero and Catullus, but speaking scientifically there is no way to establish which one is "standard" and, in historical fact, the richness of Classical Latin's morphology derives in large part from all the different "vulgar" dialects it incorporated. My comment was pure snobbishness, and he was right to point it out to me.
I'm mentioning this because I do understand that language shift is an enormously complex topic, and that the idea of a standard/non-standard dichotomy is largely unproductive, but sometimes--some rare and precious times--a native English speaker comes across uses of his language which are fucking hilarious.
There is a billboard on the ring road that reads: "Loud Sound of Fanta Bunking is Allowed." Most of the sign is an impossibly beautiful Nepali girl happily sucking down a bottle of Fanta soda pop. What any of this has to do with loud sounds, or bunking, is beyond me. What I find intriguing is that this phrase might conceivably mean something to a Nepali. The sign is written entirely in English--actually it says "Fanta ko Loud Sound" but "ko" is equivalent here to "of"--but it seems aimed at the peculiar pidgin dialect of English spoken by most Nepalis here. For example, it took me several attempts at getting leftovers before I realized that if I wanted them, I had to say the word "packing." There is no Nepali equivalent, as everyone uses the English, and only the word "packing" will do: ask for take-away or to go and all you're going to get are blank stares.
However, what is undoubtedly one of the funniest parts of living in Asia is the restaurant menus. Chinese restaurants in particular have a unique gift for creating masterpieces of English. A friend told me that in his travels through Western China and Tibet, he came across a lot of onions exploding things--Onion Explodes the Chicken, Onion Explodes the Duck. One time he saw "Pork Fuck" offered. He (reasonably) assumed this meant taking a pig, and fucking it.
Recently a Chinese restaurant opened here that has a menu chock full of gems. They range from the vaguely ungrammatical ("the juice fragile peel shrimp of eggplant," "cooking fish with red," "the piece on the red soup meat," "the drunk prawn of flavor," "splash with spice fish"), to the unappetizing ("the hand torn of meat," "the soil chicken soup of turnip"), to the unintelligible ("gerlic bringle cold food," "edible eith silk of ckenich"), to the disturbing ("assorted pot of sons"). "On frying the egg" sounds, to me, like the great Alexander Pope poem there never was. My personal favorite, though, is "saliva chicken."
It does make me feel a little bit colonialist to be laughing at non-native speakers' use of English. Or, more broadly, to find humor in the various appropriations of Anglophone culture that take place here daily. I just can't help thinking it's funny, though, when I see a tough-looking grown man walking down the street wearing a t-shirt that says "Avril Lavigne" and has her giant face plastered on it. (Britney Spears is another common favorite.)
I'm mentioning this because I do understand that language shift is an enormously complex topic, and that the idea of a standard/non-standard dichotomy is largely unproductive, but sometimes--some rare and precious times--a native English speaker comes across uses of his language which are fucking hilarious.
There is a billboard on the ring road that reads: "Loud Sound of Fanta Bunking is Allowed." Most of the sign is an impossibly beautiful Nepali girl happily sucking down a bottle of Fanta soda pop. What any of this has to do with loud sounds, or bunking, is beyond me. What I find intriguing is that this phrase might conceivably mean something to a Nepali. The sign is written entirely in English--actually it says "Fanta ko Loud Sound" but "ko" is equivalent here to "of"--but it seems aimed at the peculiar pidgin dialect of English spoken by most Nepalis here. For example, it took me several attempts at getting leftovers before I realized that if I wanted them, I had to say the word "packing." There is no Nepali equivalent, as everyone uses the English, and only the word "packing" will do: ask for take-away or to go and all you're going to get are blank stares.
However, what is undoubtedly one of the funniest parts of living in Asia is the restaurant menus. Chinese restaurants in particular have a unique gift for creating masterpieces of English. A friend told me that in his travels through Western China and Tibet, he came across a lot of onions exploding things--Onion Explodes the Chicken, Onion Explodes the Duck. One time he saw "Pork Fuck" offered. He (reasonably) assumed this meant taking a pig, and fucking it.
Recently a Chinese restaurant opened here that has a menu chock full of gems. They range from the vaguely ungrammatical ("the juice fragile peel shrimp of eggplant," "cooking fish with red," "the piece on the red soup meat," "the drunk prawn of flavor," "splash with spice fish"), to the unappetizing ("the hand torn of meat," "the soil chicken soup of turnip"), to the unintelligible ("gerlic bringle cold food," "edible eith silk of ckenich"), to the disturbing ("assorted pot of sons"). "On frying the egg" sounds, to me, like the great Alexander Pope poem there never was. My personal favorite, though, is "saliva chicken."
It does make me feel a little bit colonialist to be laughing at non-native speakers' use of English. Or, more broadly, to find humor in the various appropriations of Anglophone culture that take place here daily. I just can't help thinking it's funny, though, when I see a tough-looking grown man walking down the street wearing a t-shirt that says "Avril Lavigne" and has her giant face plastered on it. (Britney Spears is another common favorite.)