Grand Aspirations

No, this post is not about desires or longings, but about a different type of aspiration.

If you are unfamiliar with the linguistic meaning of aspiration, please hold your open hand up to your mouth and say the word 'tap'. For most dialects of English you would have felt two little puffs of air as you pronounced the word. Those puffs of air are called aspiration.

Now say the word 'dab'. You probably didn't feel much aspiration with that word.

In English we aspirate the letters p, t, k, and ch. We do not aspirate b, d, g, or j.

Bangla aspirates all of those sounds...and doesn't aspirate them. That means that whether I aspirate them or not, the word's meaning changes. On top of that, whereas English has the one aspirated t sound, Bangla has 4 different t's!!!

Anyway, spending so much time focusing on aspiration has had one odd affect. When I hear English being spoken, the aspiration sometimes feels really harsh and shocking...why must we fire puffs of air out of our mouths all the time! It's so abrasive! I never realized it before.

I wonder if non-native English speakers ever feel like we are trying to blow them over with all of our aspirational words!

From East Pakistan to Bangladesh

In 1947 England partitioned the British Raj into Pakistan and India. Pakistan was made up of West Pakistan (modern day Pakistan) and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh.

This last week as part of learning Bangla I went on a field trip to Dhaka's Liberation War Museum.

The museum briefly touched on the ancient history of this land, people have been living here for thousands of years. Even so, Bangladesh has only existed since 1971, so both of my parents are older than Bangladesh.

I wrote a couple of papers on the tumultuous relationship between India and Pakistan during my MA, so I was aware of the role that India played in helping Bangladesh achieve freedom. I was not, however, aware of one of the, if not the, primary issue that pushed the Bangladeshis to rebel; the Bangla language.

Pakistan tried to increase the role of Urdu in East Pakistan while suppressing the use of Bangla. This particular type of ethnic oppression occurs in a lot of places and it has become, at least for me, a red flag for oppressive regimes that tend towards xenophobia. Oppressing languages has led to rebellions by ethnic groups for whom taking their language is the last straw.

So it was in Bangladesh. I was amazed to find so much of the museum covering the role that Bangla played in the build up to war. This was the first place in which I saw placards denoting people as "language martyrs".

It was an interesting, gory, and challenging museum to walk through. I think this history should serve as a warning to those who would try and suppress and/or take another's language from them. It could really backfire!