ਮੈਂ ਹੁਣ ਨੱਚ ਰਿਹਾ ਹਾਂ!

[muckefuck]

Breakthrough on the Punjabi front! My dim brain finally connected words like "nachde" and "nachiye", which look like verb forms, with Sanskrit natya, an element that shows up in such terms as Bharatanatyam, a form of Indian classical dance. In most modern vernaculars, the ty palatalises to [c], which sounds like "ch" to English speakers.

So these look like verb forms because they are. They're forms of the verb "to dance", which might explain why they show up ALL THE DAMN TIME in bhangra lyrics. Duh! Can't imagine why ਨਾਚ isn't in the glossary of my little Punjabi grammar, but I suppose an author writing in 1972 could hardly have foreseen how traditional Punjabi folk music would be given new life in the dance clubs of post-Thatcherite Britain. Oh, and I've finally found a decent site for bhangra lyrics, House of Bhangra, though I'm finding their home-grown transcriptions even harder to puzzle out than that used for Hindi on the Bollybeat sites.

After some confusion over where to meet, Chef Jeff and I did get together for a little language exchange last night. He confessed that he'd actually had a semester or two of Mandarin classes in college but had ended up mostly sleeping through them--literally. I gave him a few introductory lessons from our beginners' class and we spent about ten minutes trying to get him to pronounce 枝 correctly. We'll see how it goes.

For my part, I tried to puzzle out the Thai on the shop signs across the street. Chef Jeff corrected the mistakes--both mine and the signwriters'. You can't imagine my relief at discovering that the one I had the most trouble with was actually written in Lao. So that explains it!

Comments

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Nache Baliye!

(If you're going to get songs stuck in my head, then expect to pay the price my friend.)