Archive for the ‘Language’

A-Z of Sri Lankan English: T is for this thing

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Original photo by Deshan Tennekoon What do you call something whose name you don’t know or can’t remember, or which you prefer to avoid naming for whatever reason? A whatsit or a widget? a thingy or a thingummy? a thingamabob or a thingamajig? a gadget, a gubbins or a gizmo? a whatsitsname or a whatchamacallit? The proper term for all these words is a placeholder name. Wikisaurus lists dozens of them here. In Sri Lankan English that something is normally called a this thing, but this doesn’t appear on the Wikisaurus list. It can refer to any inanimate object (“Did you remember to bring your this thing?”); it serves as a euphemism (“You could see his this thing!”); and it can be made plural (“Don’t forget your this things!”). It can function as an adjective (“You must be feeling very this thing”), or as a verb (“They must have this-thinged it earlier”), sometimes with the addition of the suffix –fy…

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Cast as Mother – A Reading: Audience Reviews

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Photo by Ruvin de Silva ‘Cast as Mother’ – a dramatic reading of an upcoming play by Stages Theatre Group was held at the Lionel Wendt on May 24. Directed by Ruwanthie de Chickera, ‘Cast as Mother’ featured the writings of thirteen women from the Sinhala and English stage on their experiences of motherhood. The 90 minute presentation drew its material from a 300 page manuscript, and was performed in Sinhala and English. The play, which is currently being devised, will be staged from September 13 – 16 at the Lionel Wendt Theatre. Stages Theatre Group encouraged members of the audience to write in with feedback. Here we publish a cross section of excerpts of these reviews and comments.  In shows to come, Stages will continue to promote Audience Reviews that will no doubt contribute to a culture critical debate in the arts. ### If motherhood in Asia, and especially in Sri Lanka, is one of the prototypical roles which…

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A-Z of Sri Lankan English: S is for Singlish

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Singlish is the term used to describe the mixture of Sinhala and English which is frequently used by bilingual speakers. But Singapore got there first: Singlish is generally accepted as referring to colloquial Singaporean English. In a Sri Lankan context, the word tends to be used humorously or derogatorily to refer to colloquial usage which is considered substandard. Singlish is alive and well in the advertising industry, in baila lyrics, and online. Regional equivalents include Hinglish, which is thriving in India, Banglish, which the Bangladeshi government has recently attempted to outlaw on radio stations, and Tanglish, as popularised in the lyrics of the song “Why This Kolaveri Di”. Some people use the term Singlish interchangeably with Sri Lankan English, but it is important to make a distinction between the two. Singlish may be considered one feature of SLE, but it is only part of the story – not least because it ignores the significant influence of Tamil. Singlish includes the…

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Review of ‘Kandy at War’ by Channa Wickremesekera

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Image courtesy Sri Lanka Travel Guide “When we think of it, we see at once what the confusion of thought was to which the Western poet [i.e. Rudyard Kipling], dwelling upon the difference between East and West, referred when he said, ‘Never the twain shall meet.’ It is true that they are not yet showing any real sign of meeting. But the reason is because the West has not sent out its humanity to meet the man in the East, but only its machine. Therefore the poet’s line has to be changed into something like this: Man is a man, machine is machine, And never the twain shall meet.” Rabindranath Tagore[1] This is what the Portuguese unleashed in 1505 in Lanka, the machine of plunder. They were followed by the Dutch and ultimately the British in the late 18th century. They were able to control, exploit and plunder most of island except the Kandyan kingdom. The kingdom successfully resisted colonisation…

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A-Z of Sri Lankan English: R is for rubber slippers

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Image courtesy Odel They’re called thongs in Australia, jandals in New Zealand, Hawaii chappals in India and Pakistan. According to Wikipedia, they’re known as slip-slops in South Africa, go-aheads in the South Pacific, japonkis in Poland, and vietnamkis in Russia. The standard term in the UK and the US is flip-flops. Here in Sri Lanka they’re most commonly referred to as rubber slippers; also bathroom slippers, and Bata slippers (or Batas). And some of us like to talk about our Arugam Bays. To a speaker of British English, slippers are an item of footwear worn inside the house. They are usually closed but loose-fitting, and often fur-lined to keep your toes warm. It’s unlikely that you would step outside in them. But in other less chilly parts of the English-speaking world, the word slippers is more likely to refer to any type of open sandal, usually made of leather, plastic or rubber, including flip-flops. In South Asia, slippers are the…

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Arthur C Clarke’s World of 2012: Insights from his Titanic Novel

The novel, a vision and the imagineer

The year was 1989. Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, Snr., were in office. Mikhail Gorbachev was slowly but surely dismantling the Soviet Union. The infamous Iron Curtain was crumbling under pressure from ‘people power’ across Eastern Europe. On the technology front, Personal Computers (PCs) had entered the market only a few years earlier: they were still gadgets in offices than homes. Mobile (cellular) phone services were just rolling out. The Internet was available only to privileged academics and military personnel. Its graphical interface – the World Wide Web – was not even invented. In that year, sitting at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka and using WordStar software on his Kaypro 2000 laptop (remember them, anyone?), Arthur C Clarke wrote a new science fiction novel. It was his own way of exorcising something that had haunted him for decades: the mighty ship Titanic. As he reflected many years later, “I was born five years after the biggest maritime disaster the…

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Trilingual bus signboards

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“The private transport services ministry has made it compulsory for all buses to display name boards in Sinhala, Tamil and English languages.” (Sunday Times Online 15/03/12) The 135 bus runs past my house on its way from Kohuwala to Kelaniya. There’s one particular bus which I see regularly with a trilingual nameboard (see photo): in English it says “Kelaniya-Kohuwala”; in Sinhala it says “Kelaniya-Kohuwala”; in Tamil it says “Muhaduhasooailu-Mudeelaruruhaduha”. This appears to be a random collection of Tamil letters, typed on a keyboard with the caps lock key on. Did no one else notice? We’re used to seeing English signboards with spelling mistakes, but the 135 bus sign seems to take the art of the typo to a new level. Another bus on the same route appears to say “Thalana-Karahawanala”, but in such small print that it is barely legible. I have counted 4 different Tamil versions of Kohuwala, none of which are actually correct. The closest, displayed by most…

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  • 13 Mar, 2012
  • 0 Comment
  • Colombo,
    Culture,
    Language

Culture & culture: 14 March to 19 March

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Dinner review Jack Tree, Park Rd., Col 5 Gray cement all around, dark green trim (to emulate a Jak tree no doubt), with red elements reflected in the staff uniforms, combined with screened off seating, give it a retro rather than modern look as far away from an imagined Thailand as you can get. Service on an avg. Monday is quick and efficient. The fresh juices: Mango, Passion Fruit, Ambarella & Lime are equally delicious – tangy and not over-sweet. The Pandung leaf chicken starter is moist and flavorsome while the trio of Mushrooms is indistinguish-ably disguised in deep-fried batter. Ginger fish is lightly battered & redolent with ginger, Eggplant w/Tofu – firm & tasty, the Kankun crisp & crunchy while not being drowned in sauce. Chicken in green curry sauce was disappointing, as it arrived with a thick, coconut cream gravy without enough green! The sizzling cuttlefish while tender and delectable, hid in a plate of veg, making me…

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A-Z of Sri Lankan English: Q is for quazi

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Equality before the law? I’m no lawyer, but I have always wondered how this fundamental principle is possible in a country with several different legal systems operating alongside one another. The main systems are Roman-Dutch law and the British legal system, bequeathed by the colonial administrators. But three other systems also survive – Kandyan law, Thesavalamai, and Muslim law, which cover certain areas of civil law such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Roman-Dutch law was introduced by the Dutch, and confirmed under the British as the common law of Sri Lanka. Today it exists only in Sri Lanka and South Africa. Kandyan law relates to marriage, divorce and inheritance, and applies to Sinhalese of Kandyan descent (whether or not they are resident in Kandy). Thesavalamai relates to property and inheritance, and applies only to Jaffna Tamils. Muslim law is administered by the quazi courts, which have jurisdiction over marriage and divorce settlements within the Muslim community. Quazi is the Arabic…

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Some Comments of Udayasiri Wickramaratne’s ‘Suddek Oba Amathai’

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Photo courtesy Suddek Oba Amatai Facebook page It is Lakshman Piyasena, introduced to me by my friend Jayantha Dhanapala, who first told me of Udayasiri Wickramaratne’s play. Piyasena urged Dhanapala and me to see a performance of Suddek Oba Amatai and kept us informed of dates when the play was due to go on the boards in Colombo. I am most grateful to both Messrs. Dhanapala and Piyasena for directing me to this excellent piece of theatre. Accordingly, a few weeks ago, I was privileged to watch a production of Udayasiri Wickremaratna’s notable play Suddek Oba Amatai (A White Man Addresses You). It was a sumptuous evening at the theatre as the play stimulates the senses at the same time as it provides the audience with much food for thought. The dramatic fare on offer entertains the theatergoer as it provokes him/her to think. The acting was very good with Nalin Pradeep Udawela (who plays the role of the sudda or…

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Five Precepts of Identifying a Sri Lankan Traitor

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Image courtesy Transparency International Recently an air of nervousness has insinuated itself in to the Sri Lankan psyche. Doubt and uneasiness seem to be seeping like moisture through invisible social capillaries, carrying a message of treachery.  Evident is an alien concern; being branded foully on this island, which suddenly seems to have become a wellspring of traitors! Since this strange, new phenomenon of escalating treachery could hardly be attributed to ‘something in the water’, its fountainhead must be where that abhorrent label is encountered most frequently – in the rhetoric of the politicians! Amongst the populace, there seems to be great confusion as to what defines a ‘traitor’ in todays’ Sri Lanka. As the term lies undefined, an air of uncertainty hovers darkly over Sri Lankans who are forthright, querying or even concerned about the future of their nation and her people. Speak out and question, and from some corner emanates an uncertain hiss of,  ‘Is that a Traitor…?’. To…

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In conversation with Shashi Tharoor at Galle Literary Festival

As part of the Galle Literary Festival, I had the opportunity to speak with Shashi Tharoor, whose writing I’ve immensely enjoyed read since my University days in India. As the festival’s website notes, Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of twelve books, both fiction and non-fiction, including the classic The Great Indian Novel (1989), India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Nehru: The Invention of India (2003) and The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century (2007). He is an elected member of the Indian parliament, former Minister of State for External Affairs and former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations. Our hour-long conversation at the Festival was anchored to The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cellphone: Reflections on India in the 21st Century, a collection of essays on India which I noted flows naturally from his earlier collection Bookless in Baghdad. We begin our conversation with an exploration of relative truths, and whether under…

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A-Z of Sri Lankan English: O is for our people

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Boys will not always be boys! Photo credit: National Geographic The possessive pronoun “our” is deceptively simple. But who are the “we” that it refers to? The expression our people is a remarkably high-frequency term in Sri Lankan English. On a search of the Groundviews website, the phrase gets around 400 hits, compared to just 331 in the 100-million-word British National Corpus. In British English, the phrase most often refers to members of a particular organisation (“I’ll get one of our people to call you back”). With reference to nationality, it is rarely used to refer to the whole population of the country, except perhaps in a political context with nationalistic overtones – for example, an anti-immigration tirade bemoaning the plight of “our people”. More often it would be used in the context of a specific group such as Irish Catholics, the Bangladeshi community, etc. In Sri Lankan English, the expression can convey a sense of patriotism, but it is…

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Good English skills over a University education?

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Image courtesy Seven myths about English Education in Sri Lanka, by Ajith P. Perera It was not so long ago that the post-nominals B.A. (Calcutta) Failed was a sure route to employment in the administrative cadre of the  Government of India, in addition to being a matter of distinction in their own right. Even a decade ago, the university degree was perceived to be the key to the almighty white-collar job, and the stability, prestige and standard of living that were associated with it. Today that is no longer the case; with the decline of our university system and ever faster globalisation, command of the English language  is now the passport to success. It is not without good reason that the market chooses to prize sound linguistic skills in English over a university education. Employers find that candidates with a thorough knowledge of English are able to communicate more effectively; both with one another in multi-ethnic workplaces and with foreign parties, an increasing common occurrence. Tourism, logistics and…

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The Story of Learning Lessons by Counting Costs

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One morning last week, as I sat in my armchair reading the report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliations Commission (LLRC), I saw a man dressed only in a sarong running along the road just outside my house. You might think there is nothing unusual about a man in a sarong running – perhaps he is running to catch a bus or is being chased by a dog. That might be so, if I saw this running man in Sri Lanka. But no, this is one freezing winter morning in BridgeTown, UK, where the probability of a seeing a man running in his sarong is infinitesimally small. Remember the story about someone famous jumping out of the bath-tub and running naked on the road shouting “Eureka”? My story today is something in the same spirit. The man I saw is a friend. His name is Accuratus Numeratus, with origins in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He earns a living by extracting useful…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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