The title of this post is "hello" in Ojibwe, Swahili, and Rumanian. If you like, I could say "hello" to you in Hindi, Inuktitut, and Serbian, too, and, in fact, in 69 other languages. I could ask you your name in all those languages, and I could say goodbye to you. In other words, I have learned how to say, "Hello," "What's your name?" and "Goodbye" in 75 of the world's languages.
I have my granddaughter to thank for this. She set me this task for my 75x75 project (doing 75 things of 75 repetitions each before my 75th birthday in July. See thingstodoinmy75th year.blogspot.com). I loved doing this project! I loved her for giving it to me. Learning these phrases took me all around the world, looking for which of the world's 6500 languages to learn, so I got a little geography lesson along with glimpses into the languages themselves, in all their varieties. Oh, wonderful, wonderful world!
I started on July 21 with languages that would be easy for me: Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. My method was to find five languages at a time with YouTube clips showing me how to pronounce them, then make a print-out of the three phrases in the five languages with my own pronunciation designations under the correct spellings. When I had memorized those, I made flash cards of them, which I took on my daily walks. The bulk of cards grew slowly. Sometimes I would get languages mixed up, but repetition did wonders. The earlier languages I learned that I had thought so difficult – Basque, Welsh, Estonian – were soon as comfortable on my tongue as French and German. Now Tamil is as easily said as Hebrew, and Togalog as Korean.
Near duplicate phrases were common. "Name" is "ingoa" in Maori, "igoa" in Samoan, and "inoa" in Hawaiian. Some variation of "salam" for "hello" is frequent in Near Eastern languages, and a lot of languages use "ciao" for "goodbye." The Chinese, Vietnamese, and Xhosa say "Goodbye" with a version of "bye-bye."
My favorite way to ask "What is your name?" is in Somali, with the visually unpronounceable "Magacaagu muxuu xahay," actually pronounced as a wonderfully rhythmic "MAH-ga HAH-ga HREE-a-hay."
My favorite way to ask "What is your name?" is in Somali, with the visually unpronounceable "Magacaagu muxuu xahay," actually pronounced as a wonderfully rhythmic "MAH-ga HAH-ga HREE-a-hay."
My favorite way of greeting someone is in Ojibwe: "Aniin" (Ah-NEEN), which means, "I see your light." My least favorite way of saying goodbye is in Balinese, when one is supposed to say, "Om, shanti, shanti, shanti, om." "Say it three times," emphasized the man on YouTube. It's very respectful, but I wonder if teen-agers in Bali haven't found a way to say, "Bye" or "See ya" in Balinese.
In some languages "hello" and "goodbye" are accompanied by important gestures – putting the hands together, as in prayer, and bowing, with a different depth of the bow and position of the hands (at the heart, the chin, the mouth, the forehead) for different relationships. In Maori, there is a different greeting for one female, one male, two females, two males, a mixed group, etc. I decided it was enough to memorize just one way of greeting someone.
Sitting next to two girls learning American Sign Language in a cafe one day, I asked them to teach me my phrases in ASL. When I learned that my Uber driver in Tacoma was from Samoa, I asked him to teach me how Samoans say, "Hello," "What's your name?" and "Goodbye." I loved learning how to pronounce the click in Xhosa, a language of South Africa, and was disappointed that none of the words I learned had the "X" (click sound) in them, so I always pronounce the language name before saying the phrases, just so I can click.
The most fun moment during all the months of learning languages was when I was reading The Piano Tuner, by Daniel Mason, a novel set in British Burma in the nineteenth century. When the protagonist arrives in Burma, he meets a woman to whom he says, "Minglaba. Shih nah meh be lou kor d'le?" And I could read it! He said, "Hello. What's your name?"
The last word I learned was "Dapabachjennja" (duh-buh-puh CHEN ya), Belorussian for "goodbye," with which I finished the task! Dapabachjennja!
Now the task is not to forget all I've learned before my birthday. At the party I'll have the flash cards on a board. Guests can choose one and at some time during the party approach me and ask me to say, "Hello," "What's your name?" and "Goodbye" in that language. I could do it today!
Now the task is not to forget all I've learned before my birthday. At the party I'll have the flash cards on a board. Guests can choose one and at some time during the party approach me and ask me to say, "Hello," "What's your name?" and "Goodbye" in that language. I could do it today!
Here are the 75 languages.
American Sign Language Hindi
Arabic Hungarian
Azerbaijani Icelandic
Balinese Inuktitut
Basque Irish
Belorussian Italian
Bengali (Bangladesh) Japanese
Bulgarian Khmer
Burmese Kinyarwanda
Catalan Korean
Chinese Kurmanji (Kurds)
Chiwewa (Zambia, et al.) Latin
Croatian Latvian
Czech Lithuanian
Danish Luxembourgish
Dutch Mam (a Mayan language)
Dzongkha (Bhutan) Maori (native, New Zealand)
Estonian Marshallese (of the Marshall Islands)
Farsi (Persian) Mongolian
Finnish Nepali
French Norwegian
German Ojibwe
Greek Old English
Hawaiian Pashto (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran)
Hebrew Polish
Portuguese Tamil (Sri Lanka, Malaysia)
Punjabi (Pakistan, India) Telugu (India)
Rumanian Thai
Russian Togalog (Filipino)
Samoan Turkish
Sanskrit Urdu (Pakistan)
Serbian Vietnamese
Sinhala (Sri Lanka) Welsh
Somali Xhosa (of South Africa)
Spanish Yiddish
Sumerian Yoruba (Nigeria, et al)
Swahili Zulu
Swedish
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