Malus & Bonus

It's amusing to discover where words come from. Apparently,

• bonus is Latin for 'good', as opposed to
• malus is Latin for 'bad'

Spotted in business news here:

UBS’s SFr2.7 billion ($2.5 billion) loss for the year activated its malus (Latin for “bad”) system of accordingly reducing an executive’s bonus (“good”). Separately, the $9m in deferred stock awarded to Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs was taken as a sign of pay restraint on Wall Street. Jamie Dimon, of JPMorgan Chase, received $17m.

The Economist, 10 February 2010

No wonder, you'll feel 'good' if you get a bonus.

Ancient Language becomes Extinct

Hurtling along at great speed into a globally technology-connected future, conditions are set for localised cultures, that depended on their isolation, to evolve out of existence. Now BBC passes on the message from Professor Anvita Abbi of Jawaharlal Nehru University, that Bo, one of humanity's oldest languages has vanished into history, with the demise of it's last speaker. This language used to exist in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India which, as the map below (from andamanese.net) shows, has undergone drastic demographic change.



I remember a documentary my family saw in the 1980s on these islands. The documentary-maker-explorers described the tribals as easily provoked and very dangerous. Standing on the ships off the shore they would wave food parcels and gifts to the nervous bewildered tribals, who kept their poison-tipped arrows poised. Not very different from the meeting of cultures portrayal in the latest Avatar movie.

Times will change and cultures will transform, but in an age where audio and video recording of every expression is possible, the heritage can be preserved to some extent. Prof. Abbi has done a lot of work in this direction recording the exact phonetics as well.

Boa Sr, who died last week aged around 85, was the last speaker of ‘Bo’, one of the ten Great Andamanese languages. The Bo are thought to have lived in the Andaman Islands for as much as 65,000 years, making them the descendants of one of the oldest human cultures on Earth.

Boa Sr was the oldest of the Great Andamanese, who now number just 52. Originally ten distinct tribes, the Great Andamanese were 5,000 strong when the British colonized the Andaman Islands in 1858. Most were killed or died of diseases brought by the colonizers.

- www.survivalinternational.org

And, sadly this will not be last language to disappear in the region.

It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representative of those languages whose history goes back to pre-Neolithic times in Southeast Asia and possibly the first settlement of the region by modern humans. These isolated Andamanese languages that are spoken by the descendents of the aboriginal population of Southeast Asia are, at present, ‘very critical’ stage.

- www.andamanese.net

A useful description of how to identify languages on the path of fading out is in a paper by Prof. Abbi and colleagues:

Moribund languages are characterized by lack of will to learn and teach the heritage language. The language does not get transferred from the older to the younger generation. Another important feature of the moribund languages is loss of registers and reduced domains of use. In the restricted domains that the language is used show traces of earlier varieties in lexical items and grammatical structures once spoken. The loss of various registers also results in the lack of total mutual intelligibility even among the speakers who have retained the language.

- Where Have all the Speakers Gone? A Sociolinguistic Study of the Great Andamanese, by Anvita Abbi, Bidisha Som and Alok Das, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. PDF file

Aditya or Eddie (or even Andy)

Names can be as malleable as clay, especially if their original solid form is more than 2-syllables.

While western English names have a ready-made shortened form - Robert becomes Bob, William becomes Bill etc. - Indian names, outside of families, are usually spoken in full. Still, Generation X onwards, many young Indians have also adopted this practice, such as Siddhartha becomes Sid. In India my name did not survive in the two locations where I stayed. Among my friends I was known as Eddy in Chandigarh, and Andy in Bangalore, and many tangential variations.

I kept my name intact in New Zealand, hoping for a new start, till my recruitment consultant advised to pick a shorter version - so Aditya became Adi became Eddie.

Predominance of English usually decides the direction of the name conversion. What happens it was in the opposite direction, see in the great video below brought to my notice by Prasanna, or as we call him - Praz.

Also, a Texan's sincere attempt attempt at learning the Indian name pronunciation:
How to Pronounce Indian Names

Kuch bhi Jhel Jaye

My parents are getting their wardrobes fixed. In a tropical country, wood is rarely a long lasting building material. My Mum & I had a good laugh when we noticed the product byline on the plywood boards being used ..



'Kuch bhi Jhel Jaye' or कुछ भी झेल जाये, translated into simple english would be 'can deal with anything'. There's a lot lost in translation there.

Hindi, as it has spread over the huge number of communities in the India, had acquired distinct flavours across social strata. The 'street'-Hindi slang definitely, a more colourful cousin of the traditional respectful formalised Hindi, is gaining traction in the media and in people's conversation. The 'in-your-face' language uses cynicism and black-humour phrases to express the difficulties faced by rich, dense, low-resourced, and slow moving masses. It is an outlet of emotions, that many subscribe to. Therefore it is this language that now ad agencies use to form by-lines to their products, and connect to their target audience.

Coming back to our phrase, the verb 'Jhel', can be more accurately describe as 'to deal with or tolerate - without actually wanting to be in that situation in the first place'. Such as to forced to listen to somebody going on-and-on without stopping, would be a good example of 'Jhel'. In this case the plywood advertisers want to convey that their wood can deal and tolerate anything, be they termites, humidity or any other foe. By using 'Jhel' it becomes a humourous encounter.