On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 23:24 +0530, Nishant Shah wrote: > marvu che" - literally - take a stick and beat you up / beat you to hell. I > am hoping that Rushdie actually knew that what he was reporting was a > corruption and still retained it.
the narrator is a young boy at that time, and is asked by a marathi mob if he's marathi, he says no, is he gujju, no, not really, but he stammers out the bit of gujju he knows... so perfect language is not assumed :-) > P.S. I have no idea why "Betty bought some butter" never occured to me as a > vowel oriented 'mouth twister'... probably because it is the tongue that > stutters over the overlapping sounds of 'b' and 't'. Maybe there is no such > thing as a 'mouth twister' :) if you just string together vowels, you get a tarzan yell... some languages (polynesian and related - e.g. hawaiian) have few consonants, but still don't really use vowels without them! on this topic, is anyone else a fan of george perec[1]? now HE must pose quite a challenge for translators - while english and french both use 'e' a lot, translating A Void [2] and retaining the meaning while avoiding words containing the vowel throughout the novel, would have been tough. no wonder the translator got a prize for it. my favourite though is life: a users manual [3]. pace the previous discussion of post-modernish, perec is an author who brilliantly, humorously, entertainingly (and often movingly) illustrates the notion of communicating meaning through form. the literary critic quoted in wikipedia says about the e-less book: "The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille ["family"] in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential void that Perec [who lost his parents in WW2] grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood". -rishab 1. http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/perec.html 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void_(novel)
