So, my wife and I were walking down the street a few days ago and overheard two girls from my wife's home are chatting on the street. One of them saw me (apparently) and had the following to say to her friend:
naya ngaxa song zhu tshijia ru ba zig nyao go That's how you might write it in their dialect. In a more written form, this might be intelligibly transcribed as: མནའ་ཡ། ང་ཡང་གཞུག་ནས་ཕྱི་རྒྱལ་བ་ཞིག་རྙེད་དགོ mna' ya, nga yang gzhug nas phyi rgyal ba zhig rned dgo Which translates into English as: Sworn sister,in the future, I too will find a foreigner. There are a couple of interesting little things embedded in this: 1) Holy cow the Khams dialect grammar and phonetic system are crazy different from A mdo. 2) Mna' ya is a word you use to refer to your best friend int hat dialect. A mna' is an oath that you swear. Your mna' ya is someone with whom you have sworn an oath. Kind of like your sworn brother or sister. This is the literal meaning. In practice, people use it to refer to their best friends regardless of whether or not an oath has been sworn. 3) What's up with wanting to find a foreigner? For some, I'm sure it has to do with the (altogether mistaken, in my case) perception that foreigners are wealthy. But it al
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
About TimAs you can see elsewhere on this webpage, I conduct research on ethnic minorities in western China. This blog offers semi-academic musings on the minutiae of daily life out here--the sort of information otherwise destined for footnotes. Categories |