Cummer gain?

In Rawbone Malong’s book on Sow Theffricun Ingglish, Ah big yaws?, “Cummer gain?” is something Woozers (WUESAs – white urban English-speaking South Africans) say when they mean “Would you mind repeating what you just said? I didn’t quite catch it.”

In recent discussions on the alt.usage.english newsgroup there has been quite a lot of discussion on the different ways speakers of different English dialects pronounce words, causing people to say “Cummert gain?” or its local equivalent.

One of the examples I gave was from the TV programme Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, where the house of a poor but deservi ng family is renovated, and when they return and see their renovated house they all exclaim, almost without exception, “Oh my GUARD!”

Well, that’s what is sounds like to me.

Either Americans say this a great deal, or the renovatees on the TV programme are coached to say it by the producers. I suspect it may be a little of both. After all, Americans seem to be in the habit of abbreviating it to OMG, so it must be a fairly common saying among them.

The objection, of course, is that they are not actually saying “Oh my GUARD” but “Oh my GOD” — “God” may sound like “guard” to speakers of non-American dialects of English, but it doesn’t sound like that to Americans.

So how do you explain “god” to Americans who pronounce it like “guard”?

Or how do you explain other words with the short “o” vowel, like “hot”, “cot”, “rod”, “sod”, “dog” and many others.

One way of doing so is through the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), where, we are told, this particular sound is represented by a kind of backwards a — ɒ. You can read about it here.

Because it is difficult to type that on most keyboards, an Ascii IPA has been developed, in which it is represented as [A.] — a capital A with a full stop after it.

The problem with that is that one of the examples given in the Wikipedia article implies that the Afrikaans word daar is pronounced like English hot in Limpopo province. I’ve not heard that, ever. It also says that in South African English, uncultured version, park is pronounced like pock, as in pockmarked. I’ve never heard that either. I have heard some people pronounce park like pork, as in “Pork the cor”, but that is a different vowel from the o in “hot”.

So it seems that there are limitations in phonetic alphabets as a way of describing the pronunciations of different dialects of English, or other languages. But the Web provides a solution.

There is a nice international pronunciation site, www.forvo.com, where you can listen to different people pronouncing words in various dialects of various languages, and you can also add your own if your own language or accent is not adequately represented there. You can listen to my pronunciation of various words here, and if you click on the words, you can hear how other people pronounce them.

One of the most useful phrases for illustrating the vowel we have been discussing here, is “hot dog”, and I invite other English-speaking South Africans to add their pronunciation of “hot dog” to the file.

In South Africa we have 11 official languages, and if you speak any of them as your native language, please add it to the pronunciation files. I’d like to hear how Afrikaans speakers, especially those from Limpopo province, pronounce daar, and I don’t think that even if you say Daar doerrrrr in die bosveld you will get anything that remotely resembles the “o” in English hot. But I’m open to being convinced, so if you normally pronounce it like that, please convince me.

I would also be interested to see how the IPA represents the Zulu “u” in umuntu, and how native speakers actually say it. It is similar to some English sounds, like the oo in book, in Woozer English (which is quite close to, but not identical with, the black urban English-speaking South African English popularly called the “Model C accent”). But the u in umuntu is not identical with the oo in book, which, I suppose, is why they stopped spelling Zulu as Zooloo.

So whatever your accent or variety of  English, go to the Forvo web site and add to the sound files. And if your language is not English, you can add to those sound files too. It seems to be pretty good in Russian, too. I’m glad about that, because one of the difficulties I have with Russian is that the stress always seems to fall where I least expect it.

Reënboog in die skemering: book review

Reënboog in die skemering by Elizabeth Vermeulen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I’ve just finished reading Reënboog in die skemering (Rainbow in the twilight), the third book of the Diepfontein trilogy (the other two being Towergoud and Fata Morgana and so now I can look back on the series as a whole. And looking back, it seems that the most appropriate title might be “The story of an African farm”.

The story of an African farm is, of course, the title of a book by Olive Schreiner, and comparisons are inevitable, as both are set on Karroo farms, and they are set in roughly the same period.

Since finishing the books I have tried to find out a bit more about the author. I didn’t want to do that beforehand, because I thought it might reveal too much of the story, and I wanted to read the books just as they came. I didn’t even read the jacket blurb that was on the last of the series.

But web searches reveal little about the author, other than that Elizabeth Vermeulen was born on 15 May 1897 in Aberdeen, in the Karroo. Last year we passed through Aberdeen on holiday, and stopped to take photos of some of the Victorian houses for which it is famous. One of my wife Val’s colleagues at work was born there, and asked us to take some photos of the town.

Victorian house in Aberdeen, Karroo

One of the things I was hoping to learn was whether Vermeulen was influenced by Schreiner in any way. Apart from the setting of a Karroo farm, the books are very different. It is a long time since I read The story of an African farm so my memory of it is a bit hazy. But both have written about a farm and its people.

In the Diepfontein trilogy, the farm is a central character. People come and go, but the farm remains. At first I thought the books were a kind of family saga, following a family through several generations, but they actually remain in focus only when they are on the farm. Occasionally the story follows characters when they leave the farm, , but usually only briefly, and for parts of the story that are significant for the life of the farm itself. Once the characters leave the farm permanently, for the most part they leave the story as well.

When thinking about the possible influence of The story of an African farm, I wonder if Vermeulen might have written her story in reaction against against Schreiner’s work. There is nothing of Schreiner’s incipient feminism in the Diepfontein trilogy. Sex roles are fairly fixed. The farmers are male, women know their place, as housekeepers, and the only other careers that are open to them are as nurses and teachers. The servants, too, know their place. That is, of course, true to much of the period covered by the story (1864-1957), and to describe things otherwise would be anachronistic.

The books were published during the first decade of National Party rule in South Africa, and so I wondered if there might be a political slant to them. Most publishers of Afrikaans books in that period were wedded to Afrikaner nationalism, and, to use an anachronistic term, “affirmative action” was all the rage. To be promoted in the civil service, one needed to be a member or supporter of the National Party, a member of one of the three Afrikaans Reformed Churches, and a member of the Broederbond. So one expects Afrikaans books published in that period to reflect these concerns. But, apart from the period of the Anglo-Boer War, there is little mention of politics in the books. I imagine that if Elizabeth Vermeulen grew up in Aberdeen, she would have been two years old when the war started, and five when it ended, and over the next few years would have heard adults talking about it. But there is no mention of the National Party coming to power in 1948.

So in a sense the books are very ordinary. They paint a picture of ordinary people living ordinary lives. They have conventional values for people of their time and social status, and I think the book paints a pretty realistic picture of the kind of life they lived. It is a historical novel with fairly good history, in the sense of the social history of people living on isolated farms, their joys and sorrows, and how they respond in prosperity and adversity. What I liked about the books was that I could identify with these very ordinary people and their struggles, and was drawn in to the story. I wanted to know what happened mext, and how things turned out in the end. So they drew me in and kept me reading.

View all my reviews

Language culture and education

clipped from www.thetimes.co.za Afrikaans-speaking parents are pulling their children out of Newcastle High School, claiming the pupils are being discriminated against. Twenty-seven learners left the former Afrikaans-medium school this week to attend the neighbouring Ferrum High School. Parents claim that black teachers can’t speak Afrikaans. They also maintain that deputy principal Muggie Liebenberg was overlooked for the principal’s position, despite doing “excellent work”. Parent Francois Lichtenstein, who unsuccessfully took the governing body to court to force it to retain the school’s Christian identity, said Afrikaans was deliberately being eroded. But new principal Manuel Govender denied that Afrikaans was being done away with. “It’s very sad that people can’t accept change. I understand change is very difficult, but at the end of the day we can learn to tolerate our differences,” he said.

I can’t help thinking that there is more to this story than meets the eye. Even when one reads the full version, rather than the bits I’ve cited in the clip, it seems that there is more in the subtext than in the text itself, one needs to read between the lines to find the issues that everyone seems to be trying to avoid.

The trouble is that there are several different issues here: does one try to unravel them and deal with them one by one, or must they be seen holistically, as things that cannot be disentangled?

One issue is language.

A group of Afrikaans-speaking parents are unhappy because the language used in teaching has changed, and their children are being taught in English rather than Afrikaans.

My mind goes back 30 years, when I lived in Utrecht, which is about 50 km from Newcastle. An English-speaking family I knew took their daughter out of the local primary school and sent her to a church school in Newcastle. Why? Because the local school was predominantly Afrikaans. Back in those days, of course, all the pupils at government schools were white. In Natal, most government schools in small towns were dual-medium — they taught in both Afrikaans and English, and each child was theoretically entitled to be taught in its own language.

In Utrecht, however, the majority of the children and all the teachers were Afrikaans speaking. The school principal spoke to the child’s mother, and asked why she wanted to take her child out of the school. She was doing quite well, and she could understand the lessons that were given in Afrikaans. The mother replied that those were not her objections. She was quite happy for her daughter to be taught Maths, Geography and the like through the medium of Afrikaans. What she was not happy about, however, was that the child was being taught to speak bad English by the Afrikaans-speaking teachers who could not speak English very well. The teachers at the Utrecht school would mark her English homework wrong when it was right, and punish her for speaking and writing correct English. The mother sent her daughter as a weekly boarder to Newcastle so that she could learn to speak and write her own language properly.

Now the boot is on the other foot. Afrikaans parents are having to have their children taught by English-speaking teachers. I can sympathise with their position. They surely have a right to have their children taught to speak and write their own language properly, even if they learn Maths and Geography through English.

If language were the only problem, then it could be solved by the education department doing a survey, and discovering how many Afrikaans speaking children there are in the town and where they live, and plan schools accordingly. The trouble is that most of the existing schools were planned in the days of apartheid, when people lived in segregated areas, and Afrikaans schools were given preference. The legacy of apartheid lives on. Now the demographics have changed, and perhaps the Afrikaans schools need to be consolidated.

But there is more to it than just language, of course, and that is where the sub-texts come in.

One person quoted in the report spoke of the “Christian identity” of the the school, and another mentioned an “Indian broederbond” that had taken over the school governing body.

So it’s not just language, but religion and race as well.

And that is where I wonder about the things that we are not told in the report.

What is meant by the “Christian identity” of the school being eroded? Is it that most of the teachers are now using a heathen language like English, or are they now singing hymns to Shiva at the school assembly?

The platitudes from the principal that end the article don’t seem to get near what is really going on.