Random thoughts at the end of the year...

This post does not have much content as I am still coping with my mother’s passing. I immerse myself in my work to keep my mind occupied; “7 to 7” is my often used phrase when I am asked about my schedule at work. This has detrimental effect, as I have noticed, on my other responsibilities, to say nothing of the effect on my health, and ironically on my memory—chunks of time are simply gone, I forget fast and...

To remedy the situation, I turn to writing; not that I purport to be any good at it, but when vocal therapy isn't an option for me, writing seems to work. That and music of course.

I am listening to Caruso performed by the late Pavarotti. Six years have passed by since he died, but it feels as if it happened so recently. The song I am listening to now is one of the few that reaches into my soul and plucks a nerve that causes me to shed tears...manly tears of course. As I write this post, perhaps last one for this year, the music keeps playing over and over in the background. It reminds me about the swiftness of the passage of time; how we stand dumbfounded at the realization that we didn't do what we wanted to do or didn't say what we wanted to say, back then when we had the chance. Now it's all too late and we are only left with memories.

I don't remember who instilled love of opera in me, but I think it happened when I came to this country sixteen years ago. Finding myself in nostalgia at some point, I began listening to "opera" of my grandfather's generation, the ever hated shashmaqom. Oh yes, as kids we used to despise taking afternoon naps because that meant inadvertently listening to an old lady singing about her own lost love through the loudspeakers of radio. The soul of shashmaqom is as old as the sands of time, even if the genre itself dates from the middle of the nineteenth century. Next to love songs, performers of shashmaqom sing about friendship, as there is a blurry line between friends and lovers. One of my favorite songs is adaptation of poem of Mirzo Tursunzoda; the rhythm of the words feels so natural to the genre.

То тавонӣ дӯстонро гум макун,              (Toe tavoni doustonro goom makun) 

Дӯстони меҳрубонро гум макун.            (Doustoni mehrubonro goom makun)

Дар ҷаҳон бе дӯст будан мушкил аст, (Dar jahon be doust budan mushkil ast)

Мушкилосонкункасонро гум макун.       (Mooshkilosonkoonkasonro goom makun)

Try best, of friends you have, to lose them not

The friends who are kind to you, lose them not

In this world it is hard to go by without friends

Those who ease your hardships, lose them not

I never fully learned to speak the language of my ancestors, and I am afraid my ambitions to catch up with my contemporaries are all in vain now. Today, I have lived more in this foreign country I now call home than in a country I was born. This is why I have never seen in Tajik language such a heavy word as mooshkilosonkoonkasonro. Perhaps, there are many such complex words, but I know them not. The word can be broken down into: mooshkil (hardship), oson (easy, to ease), koon (to do), kas (person), on (suffix denoting action, like English “er” in teacher), and ro (suffix denotaing plural form). I am certain I made translational inexactitudes, but that is beside the point. Exact meaning of the word mooshkilosonkoonkasonro is evident to any speaker of the Tajik language; one does not need to break it apart in order to grasp its exact message. Another thing I am certain about is that such individuals, as the word describes, are actually rare in our lives.

I have never had many friends. Those who can be trusted with your life’s secrets, its pains and joys, are few indeed. More difficult than making friends is the experience of losing them. Such instances shatter one’s well-being, in some cases permanently. Tears, instant form of free therapy, are not substitute for super glue.

Tajik language has many words for a friend, some of which are synonymous with lover: doost, oshno, rafiq, yor, jura, hamsafar, anis, urtoq, and many others. Some of these words came from different languages such as Arabic or Turkic languages. Beauty of Tajik language is in its ability to adapt to constant change; it takes only the best of what others have to offer, leaving aside negative aspects of foreign culture. Whereas others see differences between the language and its speakers, I see similarities. For me, it is not important who spoke the word first, ancestors of the Tajik people or those from whom they adopted a word. What matters for me is our ability to connect to others using something as common as a single word. The world is already full of negativity, there is too much hatred and disdain, why add to it? 

Recent events at the Independence Square of Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, have been less than friendly, to say the least. Every news report one reads (or watches) is filled with such rhetoric as “heroes of Maidan this...” or “liberators at Maidan that...” Ukrainian maidan is synonymous to the Tajik maidon, both mean large public gathering space in the center of settlement (village, town, city). I won’t go into the history of this word (nor into the politics of Ukraine); suffice it to say, I find it amazing that both Tajiks and Ukrainians have at least one word in common between their languages. Instead, I want to use this opportunity to present readers of this blog with a short list of words, which always fascinated me by a mere commonality throughout so many languages. Let's start with the supposedly first word we utter when we are brought into this world: mother.

English is a Germanic language, thus “mother” comes from Mutter. Interestingly, the way Germans pronounce the word (moo-tAr) is not too different from the way Tajiks do: modar. You don’t have to be an expert to see the similarity with other languages: madre (Spanish, Portuguese, Italian), μητέρα (mitera, Greek), мать (mat’, Russian), мати (maty, Ukrainian), ਮਾਤਾ (mata, Punjabi), मां (mam, Hindi), etc.

Next to “mama” we have our “dada”. Tajik падар (padar) is English “father” or German Vater (fa-tEr), Spanish/Italian padre, Greek πατέρας (pateras), Ukrainian батько (bat’ko), Belorussian бацька (bats’ka), Hindi पिता (pita), and so on.    

Perhaps, that’s not enough to fascinate your minds, and it does not really stop there, not for me at least. Tajik word for “daughter” is духтар, which is pronounced dookh-tar. This is not far from German Tochter.  If you look closely, you can see the similarity with Armenian դուստր (dustr), Greek θυγατέρα (thygatera), Indonesian putri, Finish tytär, Czech dcera, or Ukrainian (dochka).

If for a moment you think I speak all these languages, well...I won’t stop you from doing that. I have learned about the importance of linguistics in the study of history early on. Next to my fascination of nomadic cultures of the Eurasian Steppe, my favorite past time is learning about the Indo-European language family. I only speak three languages and only one of them fluently, but to illustrate my point about linguistic connections of words “mother”, “father” and “daughter”, I had to use Google-translator. It’s a very useful tool. As an exercise, look up the word “brother”; in Tajik this word is pronounced ba-ro-dar (бародар).

The word “brother” connotes unity in any language, but it is not the only word to have such a meaning. English word "band" refers to "a strip of cloth used to tie things together". This is identical to Tajik банд (band), from which the verb бастан (bastan, "to tie") derives. Another meaning of the word refers to "a group of people who stand together" either to play music or make trouble, or make trouble by playing music. Incidentally, English verb "to stand" means "to occupy a place," that is to stand your ground, or settle. Thus, the suffix "-istan" in Tajikistan, refers to "the land occupied by Tajiks”; perhaps a misnomer, as the country also includes Uzbeks, and at least during the Soviet era included Armenians, Germans, Koreans, and many other ethnic groups. In fact, English "to stand" comes from the same root as Tajik истодан (istodan).

Whereas it is not too hard to see the similarity between "to stand" and istodan, there are words in English and Tajik languages which come from the same root and yet look very different, and pronounced differently. One of my favorites is the word for "cleaning substance" that is to say, soap, which in Tajik is собун (so-boon). It is hard to see similarity between soap and soboon, especially when you consider that English word comes from German Seife. What I have learned through my curios adventures into the world of linguistics is that we speak in consonants, not in vowels. Meaning, if you want to find the similarity, look for consonants, and in this case "soap" and "Seife" have the same first letter; the next best clue is "p" and "f" which are actually phonetic cousins (I'm sure there's technical word for it). There are letters in every language which are "interchangeable" during speech; consider English "hamburger" and Russian гамбургер (gum-bur-ger). Or for the case of "f" and "p" consider unit of measurement фунт (foont, Russian) vs pound (English), or even the difference between Persian and Farsi. I think I am making it sound more complicated than I mean it to be. Here is how soap pronounced in other languages:

Arabic: صابون (saboon)

Armenian: սապոն (sapon)

Bulgarian: сапун (sapoon)

Catalan: sabó

Dutch: zeep (noun) zepen (verb)

French: savon

Greek: σαπούνι (sapouni)

Hindi: साबुन (sabuna)

Italian: sapone

Japanese: ソープ (sopu)

Korean: 비누 (binu)

Latvian: ziepes

Mongolian: саван (savan)

Portuguese: sabão

Romanian: săpun

Spanish: jabón

Turkish: sabun

Urdu: صابن (sabun)

Vietnamese: xà phòng

Welsh: sebon

  

What is clear to me is that the substance, as well as the word, are universal. But soap is not the only word of its kind. Grass is the most widespread plant on our planet, and the one type of grass that is widely used by us is sugarcane. More properly, we use the product of sugarcane, which is sugar...duh! Like soap, sugar is universally known, although some parts of the civilized world could use less of the former and more of the latter. The word is шакар (shakar) in Tajik language, and we can already see phonetic cousins with the English sugar: sh/s and k/g. Here is another list:

Arabic: سكر (sukar)

Armenian: շաքար (shak'ar)

Azerbaijani: şəkər

Basque: azukre

Bulgarian: захар (zukhar)

Belorussian: цукар (tsoo-kar)

Catalan: sucre

Czech: cukr

Danish: sukker

Dutch: suiker

Estonian: suhkur

French: sucre

Finnish: sokeri

German: Zucker

Greek: ζάχαρη (zachari)

Hebrew: סוּכָּר (soo-kar)

Hindi: शक़्क़र (shaqqara)

Irish: siúcra

Italian: zucchero

Japanese: シュガー (shuga)

Lithuanian: cukrus

Latvian: cukurs

Mongolian: элсэн чихэр (elsen chikher)

Norwegian: sukker

Polish: cukier

Portuguese: açúcar

Romanian: zahăr

Spanish: azúcar

Turkish: şeker

Ukrainian: цукор (tsoo-kor)

Sometimes the connections are not obvious, so in order to see them, you have to remember two simple rules: (1) we speak in consonants and (2) each consonant letter has a phonetic cousin. I consider the following letters as phonetic cousins: p/b, p/f, f/v, m/n, g/k, s/sh, sh/ch, s/z and others. To explain how I apply the two rules, here is an illustration. You may say how is Mongolian "elsen chikher" and Tajik "shakar" are connected, and in order to see the connection you have to break each word into syllables. 

Mongolian word "elsen" means sand, in this case, "white sand". So, our connection is on the second word: chikher. Take away all the vowels, you have ch-kh-r. Do the same to the Tajik word, and you get sh-k-r. Or remove the vowels from the Ukrainian word and you have ts-k-r. More than half of the remaining consonants should leave enough clues for making a connection. I don't know, perhaps this is not convincing, but in my mind, it works very well.

These are my random thoughts that keep my mind busy in time of stress, or distress. I often don't know how to end things I start, as the case is with this post. Perhaps a good song will do it better. It is time to prepare for the New Year, and say good-bye to the old one. Don't forget where you came from, but don't dwell on your past, especially if it brings you much pain. Perhaps it is easier said than done, but I do feel much better after spending my time writing this post; no matter how random its content.

Happy New Year!