(We will be featuring some series of essays by Dr. Wangyal on a regular basis, starting with this one: Nepali Nuances. In this series Dr. Wangyal explores the richness and vitality of the Nepali language, and with his trademark and typical style he covers the range of this richly idiomatic and charmingly onomatopoetic language of ours. I hope you enjoy reading his essays, and please do leave your thoughts and remarks as comments. This is a great forum to interact with the author. Thanks, -Admin)

- Dr. Sonam B. Wangyal

With this essay we commence a seven-part series on the amazing vitality of the Nepali tongue. The subtlety, complicatedness, and the sheer beauty of the exceptionally native nuances make it a very personal language. People talk of the complexities of the English and other languages but I am a firm believer that they are a poor second to Nepali. One has to be ‘with it’ for a very long time to grasp the fine idiosyncratic shades and the incredible earthy and at times wacky rationale of the Nepali language. Could the translation ‘Losing bull: purging habit’ make any sense to a non-Nepali speaker! The Englishman would rather prefer ‘A bad workman quarrels with his tools’ but that is too simple and far too straightforward for us and so we have ‘Haruwa goruko chheruwa bani‘ and only we, the Nepali speakers, can appreciate how well and ingeniously it has been coined.

But this essay and those that will follow are not about adages, proverbs and aphorisms but about words. And we will kick it off with ‘khanu‘ or the verb intransitive (and transitive) meaning ‘to eat’ and round it off with ‘katnu‘ or to cut. Can one eat a reprimand? Well, we can for ‘Gali khanu‘ is a common exercise, after all, ‘hamiharu gali khadai ta hurkayko ho‘. We have a way of dealing with the unpleasant aspects in our lives and like eating a reprimand or rebuke we simply chew and swallow anything negative that comes our way. Therefore, we might lose but we can never get thrashed simply because we eat whatever thrashing is doled to us or ‘hami dhulai khancha‘, and to cite a few other examples we have ‘dhoka khanu‘ (to eat a duping), ‘thesh khanu‘ (to eat a stumbling) ‘laat khanu‘ (to eat a kick) etc. And the menu of edibles does not get any shorter for we have such delicacies like smoke or cigarettes (sigrate khanu), promises (kasam khanu), salary (jagir khanu), business or trade (bechi khanu) etc., but the icing on the cake must be, and unlike in the English where one would steal a kiss, we eat a kiss (moai khanu or chumba khanu in our hills), after all, the primary function of the oral cavity and its appendages is to eat.

The next word I have chosen is ‘katnu‘ (verb transitive) for ‘to cut’. Cutting, to us, is an innate inclination and every house has a khukuri to prove that. But we cut many more things than physical objects and so we, of the hills, are at home with the expression ‘dara katnu‘ (to cross a ridge) and ‘dara kataidinu‘ (to chuck it over the ridge). Similarly, we have ‘phaal katnu‘ (to jump over) and sometimes we almost kill it by saying ‘phaal marnu‘. Occasionally we set aside, or should I say cut, everything else and concentrate on a particular subject and this we term ‘bichar katnu‘. Similarly, when we slice the flow of another’s speech with an interjection it is ‘baat katnu‘ and when a soldier decides to ‘naam katnu‘ he is not chopping off his names to pieces but simply cutting it off the regiment’s roster. There are other terms like ‘hisaab katnu‘ (to deduct, or cut, from an account), ‘arkal katnu‘ (to estimate), but ‘nak katnu‘ (to be disgraced or to be subtracted of respect) was once an actual lopping of the snout, beside of course the associated deduction of status. When Prithwinarayan Shah conquered Kirtipur, he was so provoked by the Kirtipurians’ stiff resistance, he ordered the noses of all the male inhabitants of the place be chopped off, save children at breast and musicians skilled at playing wind instruments, and the order was carried out to the last detail. History books have never fully explained the mercy granted to the children and the musicians and my guess is that the children were of no threat while the musicians were necessary to welcome the all conquering Maharaja into his new domain. Mercifully, today ‘nak katnu‘ does not involve physical mutilation but just partial trimming off of social standing or reputation. Finally to my favourite ‘cut’ i.e.,
‘doko namlo katnu‘. Here ‘doko namlo‘ refers to the drudgery or the daily grind of hard physical labour a servant, slave or an impoverished person undergoes and when one is liberated from such an agonizing existence through a generous donor, a sudden windfall or children landing up with good employment it is equivalent to ‘doko namlo katnu‘.

One more ‘cut’ before I quit this piece: “Yo essay pani etimai katney.”