At the College, they thought I--the only native English speaker on campus--should be the one to teach phonetics and phonology. Phonology is the study of the sounds in English, how you anatomically make them, and the rules about them. It’s not my favorite topic. It resembles science: you have to learn an entirely new set of vocabulary, and by the time you know the topic well, you’ve left out all the words from your previous life sitting dormant on a shelf. But I said, “Sure, I’ll teach phonology.”
The other day my class and I were learning about the “t” sound. (Since it’s been about 20 years since I studied linguistics, I’m including myself as one of the learners.) I was telling students about allophones – variations of a sound. For example, the “t” in “toe” is different from the “t” in “stow.” I told students to put their palms to their mouths and say “toe” and “stow.” The puff of air is less with “stow.” Since my Tanzanian students are game for anything, no matter how silly it looks, forty of us with hands in front of our mouths repeated “toe” and “stow.”
Then I told them about the “t” in “water.” I said while the “t” in “toe” is an aspirated stop, the “t” in “water” is an alveolar flap. With the word “water,” the tip of the tongue touches the ridge on the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth. “Flap” refers to the fact that your tongue does this much more quickly with “water” than “toe.”
Then I pronounced “water” for my students--wadder. Suddenly the room erupted in wadder-wadder-wadder-wadder-wadder. I wrote “wadder” on the board and then “water,” pronounced them one at a time and asked if they could tell which one I was pronouncing. They failed every time.
I had not realized how vital this difference in “t” was -- the aspirated “t” in “toe” and the alveolar flap in “water” --until I first arrived in Tanzania. I had asked for a "boddle of wadder" for the first two days and discovered no one understood me. I told my students this story. Then I heard boddle-of-wadder-boddle-of-wadder-boddle-of-wadder for ten minutes. Then I gave them the native version of “I want a bottle of water” –I wanna boddle of wadder.
With that, I lost all classroom control. They all flowed out of the room repeating, “I wanna boddle of wadder.”
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Through the metal grate
At the small shop near me, an iron grate set in a large window solidly separates me, the customer, from anything in the shop that I want. Many, and probably most, general stores here bar any customer entrance. All exchanges pass through the holes of that grate.
My shop is run by a young man who’s about 20 years old. In the rooms adjacent to the shop, his mother, father and sister come and go, cook, clean and do other living. But this boy runs the shop from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. every single day. The exception is Christmas and New Year’s Day when his sister helps him run the shop from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. This explains why the clerk returns my greetings when I approach the grate with heavy lethargy. When I tell him what I want–matches, soap, green Christmas wrapping paper, sugar, oil–he rises from his chair sloth-like. I don’t know if sloths rise but if they do, they look like this clerk. When I ask for a half kilo of sugar, he retrieves a wrinkled piece of wax paper and lets it flutter onto a metal scale, then plops metal weights on the other side of the scale, and pours the golden brown grains of sugar onto the paper. Three sugar grains before the scale drops down, he stops pouring and begins to shake the sugar onto the paper. The instant the scale has dropped, the shaking stops, and he lifts the wax paper by two opposite corners, pouring the sugar into a bag from a third corner.
Even though ten customers have arrived and shouted out their requests–I want a cigarette! I want a bar of soap! You didn’t give me the right change last time!–he moves through the weighing of sugar just as slowly as when he began. To assert their position in line, each customer thrusts his hand through the grate waving money at him. The customer returning an empty soda bottle shoves that through the grate.
But while the customers and their demands with their thrusting hands are gathering like thundering clouds, the clerk is sorting in his mind who he can get rid of quickly and whose demand will take time. The soda bottle comes first, the cigarette comes second. The right change will take some thinking, calculating and jousting.
Requests for cooking oil or kerosene are usually last on his list because those, like the pouring and weighing of sugar, take time. Though the customer has brought her own container, the shop clerk has his own standard measuring containers–a soda bottle for the oil and a beer bottle for the kerosene. With a small metal dipper, he pours the oil from a large drum into the bottle through a funnel. Not one drop of either oil or kerosene is spilled onto the floor. (He does not work for British Petroleum.) After he’s poured the liquid into his soda or beer bottle, he pours it into the customer’s container, usually a left-over jug of oil bought a year ago. Both the clerk and customer deliver the jug, which usually doesn’t have a lid, through the grate at the only angle it will fit without spilling a drop.
When the bread man delivers 25 loaves of bread on his bicycle stacked sky high with milk crates full of bread with more loaves tied and swinging on the crates’ sides, each of those 25 loaves is passed one at a time through the window grate. The clerk could let the bread man through the back door to deliver ten loaves at a time, but he doesn’t.
In this way, we do our small shopping.
My shop is run by a young man who’s about 20 years old. In the rooms adjacent to the shop, his mother, father and sister come and go, cook, clean and do other living. But this boy runs the shop from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. every single day. The exception is Christmas and New Year’s Day when his sister helps him run the shop from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. This explains why the clerk returns my greetings when I approach the grate with heavy lethargy. When I tell him what I want–matches, soap, green Christmas wrapping paper, sugar, oil–he rises from his chair sloth-like. I don’t know if sloths rise but if they do, they look like this clerk. When I ask for a half kilo of sugar, he retrieves a wrinkled piece of wax paper and lets it flutter onto a metal scale, then plops metal weights on the other side of the scale, and pours the golden brown grains of sugar onto the paper. Three sugar grains before the scale drops down, he stops pouring and begins to shake the sugar onto the paper. The instant the scale has dropped, the shaking stops, and he lifts the wax paper by two opposite corners, pouring the sugar into a bag from a third corner.
Even though ten customers have arrived and shouted out their requests–I want a cigarette! I want a bar of soap! You didn’t give me the right change last time!–he moves through the weighing of sugar just as slowly as when he began. To assert their position in line, each customer thrusts his hand through the grate waving money at him. The customer returning an empty soda bottle shoves that through the grate.
But while the customers and their demands with their thrusting hands are gathering like thundering clouds, the clerk is sorting in his mind who he can get rid of quickly and whose demand will take time. The soda bottle comes first, the cigarette comes second. The right change will take some thinking, calculating and jousting.
Requests for cooking oil or kerosene are usually last on his list because those, like the pouring and weighing of sugar, take time. Though the customer has brought her own container, the shop clerk has his own standard measuring containers–a soda bottle for the oil and a beer bottle for the kerosene. With a small metal dipper, he pours the oil from a large drum into the bottle through a funnel. Not one drop of either oil or kerosene is spilled onto the floor. (He does not work for British Petroleum.) After he’s poured the liquid into his soda or beer bottle, he pours it into the customer’s container, usually a left-over jug of oil bought a year ago. Both the clerk and customer deliver the jug, which usually doesn’t have a lid, through the grate at the only angle it will fit without spilling a drop.
When the bread man delivers 25 loaves of bread on his bicycle stacked sky high with milk crates full of bread with more loaves tied and swinging on the crates’ sides, each of those 25 loaves is passed one at a time through the window grate. The clerk could let the bread man through the back door to deliver ten loaves at a time, but he doesn’t.
In this way, we do our small shopping.
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