TALKING THE TALK

Today is Monday, which means that in about an hour our language teacher will be here. I am really enjoying learning Sinhala, even though, at times, it can be quite difficult. I can get frustrated when it doesn't seem to follow logical patterns and I wish it was more like English. Then I take a good, hard look at English and realise that it can be just as illogical and perhaps more so, making all sorts of rules and then breaking them all along the way. Still, it is immensely rewarding to be able to string together the fragments of language that you know and find yourself successfully communicating with someone.

Today I want to share with you some of the cute little ways we have found English being used here. On the whole, people who use English can use it quite well, but we have still had some expressions catch our attention. Take colours as an example. In Sinhala, rathu pata is red; rosa pata is pink. Pata means colour. So when colours are translated into English, the Sinhalese do not say red or pink, but red-colour or pink-colour. Today I am wearing my pink colour t-shirt.

An expression I enjoy is "off the light" or "on the light". Can you please off the light? Can you please on the computer? The word 'smelly' is also used more liberally. Rather than being used for something that smells bad, it is much more likely to be used for something that smells good. Try, "I love that perfume you are wearing. It is so smelly."

Recently we learnt about a fantastic little expression. It is the Sri Lankan equivalent of the term 'best friends'. Here, my best friend would be called my 'mango friend'. So let me take a moment to say a hello to my mango friends back in Australia. An expression that caused us much more difficulty was the expression 'danma yanda'. Our teacher was trying to get us to learn it in our language class and we had to go to efforts to explain that we weren't having trouble with the Sinhala word, but rather with it's English translation. We could not for the life of us fathom what "go now itself" was supposed to mean.

But to be fair, it hasn't always been the Sri Lankans who have had some explaining to do. Learning a new language has led to a few language slip-ups of our own. Darren tried to use Sinhala to make a joke about smothering me with a pillow on my head, except he said that he should smother me with a child on my head. I had to spend about an hour practising how to say the Sinhala for 'hour' because apparently, with my pronunciation, I was saying a rude word. Unfortunately, I could not hear the difference so I have decided it will probably be better if I convert everything to minutes instead.

So let me leave you today with an anecdote from one of our language lessons, in honour of Teacher who will be here shortly. While learning the days of the week we learnt that Thursday is Brahas Pathinda. Darren got all excited and started shouting, "Bras and panties day! Prince, Prince, 3 more sleeps until bras and panties day!" Poor teacher just shook her head and said, "My God!" - which she tends to say a lot. It must be hard working with us. Good thing she's got a sense of humour. Darren says he has been a little disappointed with Thursdays. They weren't quite what he was expecting.