Yesterday, I was asked to teach English to a student from the Middle East. He has good spoken English skills and so I asked him,
“What is your final goal with the English lessons?”
“To be able to speak like a native,” he responded.
My first reaction was panic. That’s because I’m a very literal person. I take most things literally and often miss the figurative meaning of things. I nearly told him that I could certainly teach him to speak like a native but with an Indian accent.
This is not a new problem. As a 14 year old, I opted for Higher Hindi in school. We had moved to Delhi from Kerala and the only Hindi I knew was to ask someone’s name and their age (तुम्हारा नाम क्या है? तुम्हारी उम्र क्या है?) The other option was to take Higher Sanskrit. But Sanskrit was taught in Hindi and my young mind decided that I would be dealing with a double jeopardy by opting for Sanskrit.
How wrong I was! Hindi was an extremely hard language to score. Even the locals struggled to get above 50%. Sanskrit on the other hand was a doddle. The lowest mark anyone got was 60%. Anyway, my Hindi learning curve was so steep that I often fell off.
The thing that got me was the concept of metaphors and sayings which make use of them. And there were several. One of them, ऊँट के मुँह में जीरा (‘oont ke mooh mem jeera’) or a cumin seed in the mouth of a camel, confounded me. Once we were told to make a sentence that illustrates the meaning of this saying. So, I made up this elaborate story about a Bedouin Arab and his camel sweltering in the desert heat for days on end until they reached an oasis whereupon he fed the camel a single cumin seed and the camel remarked with disdain, “a cumin seed in the mouth of a camel?”
I got zero.
There were other sayings like Gangaram went to Ganga and Jamunadas went to Jamuna which basically means (I figured this out after I had failed Hindi), everyone went his own way. I blush to remember the story I made up about that one with similar end results.
Zero.
It took me some time to understand the concept of metaphors. These days when people ask me to do little consultancy jobs but offer peanuts as remuneration, I say to them, “Are you offering a cumin seed to a camel?” Even non Hindi speakers instinctively understand me. All I can say is, some crucial part was missed when I was being put together.
Anyway that’s water under the bridge, so to speak (you see I understand the concept now). But I must’ve taken my metaphors too seriously. Just the other day my friend Tom was describing a mutual friend,
“I just love Dan,” he says, “he’s so sweet. Such a decent chap. Butter wouldn’t melt ..”
The butter bit was new to me. Never having heard the expression before, I researched it and asked a few of my friends including a grammarian. The conclusion was that Tom was using the expression incorrectly. The expression, ‘butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth’ implies that the person comes across as sweet and decent but deep inside he’s a bit of a meanie.
The next time, I met Tom over a coffee, I asked him,
“You know the other day you were talking about Dan and how butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth?”
“Yes?”
“Do you know what ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ really means?”
“Oh yeah. It means he’s a sweet chap.”
“No, it means the opposite. Though I know what exactly you mean, someone else may completely misunderstand you.”
Tom was not happy with me and accused me of challenging him and informed me that he’s been speaking English all his life and expressions have to be understood by the context they’re used in and so on. We argued a bit. I told him that with this particular expression he’s been using it the wrong way all his life, that figurative expressions relying on metaphors cannot be context sensitive because that would make the English language unusable etc. Tom stopped talking to me.
Indians are quite sensitive about their English proficiency. You could correct someone’s Hindi or Tamil or any of the Indian languages that happen to be their mother tongue. But correct their English and you’re in trouble.
‘Don’t you know English?’ is one of the major insults you can inflict on an Indian. Colonial hangover, what else? But I never imagined an Englishman could get upset when his English is corrected. I had forgotten there’s no colonial effect in England. The Roman conquest was way back in the forgotten past.
Coming back to my student, I will try and speak with a neutral accent but apologies in advance if I don’t teach you a posh accent. You will not speak like an Etonian but like an alumnus of Kendriya Vidhyalaya. On the brighter side, you’ll be able to communicate seamlessly with 1.4 billion Indians with the accent that you’ll imbibe from me.
gopistory.com 