(Here is the first essay from the series “Their words, hamro vocabulary” by Dr. Sonam Wangyal. In this series of essays he looks at the influences of other languages on the Nepali tongue (and sometimes vice versa), and the fates of the words that are borrowed or modified (or mutilated) as they travel from one vocabulary to another. Enjoy! -Admin)

-Dr. Sonam Wangyal

We are, I would like to believe, a class by ourselves when it comes to adopting and adapting foreign words into our vocabulary. This short essay will consider some English words that have slipped into ours.

The word ‘hap-pen’ per se makes no sense but once its root ‘half pants’ is brought to mind the Nepali speakers’ adaptability becomes obvious. Similarly so many English words become Nepali with just the minutest of change: tile to ‘tali’, pension to ‘pinsin’ or ‘pesin’, bioscope to ‘baees-scope’, brush to ‘burus’, sentry to ’santry’ etc. Even English names of places find our sculpting tongues transforming them to suit our speech. In Darjeeling the Shrubbery Grounds became ‘Sarbary’ Ground, in Kalimpong the Homes became ‘Homus’, in Sikkim the White Hall was altered to ‘White-al’ and in Kurseong Dow Hill was changed to ‘Dao-ill’.

To arrive at our own new words we sometimes make additions and at other times we subtract from the English. A good example of our expanding a word would be ‘tar-karry’. Here the word curry (actually a word from Kerala but came to us as English ‘curry”) is expanded with the addition of ‘tar’ or gravy/sap giving us the hybrid ‘tar-karry’ or curry with gravy.

But we are at our best when subtracting and my favorite is ‘Alkatra’ for tar. In the olden days when the roads were being laid out in our hills the cold environment half the liquid tar would freeze before it was laid on the road and so oil had to be added to soften it. Thus developed the term ‘oil and coal tar’ and our forefathers not to happy with the tongue twister simply reduced it to ‘alkatra’. Similarly, the drivers had a difficult time saying ’shock-absorber, jerk-absorber’ and so they abbreviated the whole thing to ’shokup jokup’. The simplest of abbreviation is to be found with cauliflower where our ancestors just removed the second moiety ‘flower’ and kept the first part ‘cauli’ or ‘kauli’. The same goes for ‘patloong’ for pantaloons, ‘paltan’ for platoon etc.

Simple slip of the tongue can be traced in ‘eskroop’ for screw, ‘bundil’ for bundle, and ‘kitli’ for kettle.

Dr. Indra Bahadur Rai’s explanation as to why we chose not to call the tea gardens with more precise words like ‘bari’, ‘bagan’ or ‘bagaicha’ is another that I am very fond of. In the days of yore the Assisstant Managers would, pointing to the plantation, command the workers to hurry saying, “Come on, come on.” Our folks thought that the place the fingers were pointing to was the “Kaman” and so the word stuck.

It is an unwritten law that any English word commencing with an ’s’ has to be rendered with an ‘es’ in the Nepali and so we have eschool (school), espeed (speed), estand, estation, etc. Our favourite and the most useful vegetable, squash, of which we can eat every part: the fruit, the roots, the leaves, the tendrils, the stems and the shoots, took a little more refining than the simple addition of ‘es’. After all it is our special vegetable and so from squash it became ‘esquash’ according to the established system and then received an additional revision to finish off as ‘esquoosh’.

Esquoosh me for the day - I promise you more “Their’s” and “Hamro” in the future.