Turns of phrase

While Urdu is mostly reasonably straight-forward to translate once you get your head around it, today's lessons produced some rather... well... unwieldy sentence constructions.

We were doing an activity on seeing and hearing things (actual physical things, not hallucinations), and I wanted to say we could hear a bird's footsteps on the corrugated iron roof. Which ended up being:

"We, above the room, on the roof, the voice of the walking of the bird can hear."

Similarly, 'I can hear the dog barking' became:

"I, outside, the loud barking voice of the dog can hear."

Phew.

The thought crossed my mind earlier today that doing live interpretation of Urdu to English must be made incredibly difficult by the differences in word order; if it was a long sentence, you'd have to memorise it all until you finally got to the verb at the end of the sentence before you could translate it, by which time the speaker would be well on the way through their next sentence...

A few of our favourite Urdu words 1

In dodgily-transcribed-roman-character form:

• chipkli (lizard)
• gadger (carrot)
• beewee (wife)
• saass (mother-in-law)
• panties (35)
• pujpun (55)
• pissle (slip/slide)

And sentence of the week goes to:  "Can the cow slide down the glacier?", with worthy runner-up: "Can the lizard climb the rainbow?"

Answers to these intriguing philosophical questions on a postcard please.  Or on a postcard wrapped round a nice block of cheese.

Family relations

Last week in our Urdu lessons we learned the names for various different relations and family members.  And they're... complicated to say the least!

For example:

• there are different specific words for your paternal and maternal grandparents,
• there are different specific words for your son's children and your daughter's children,
• there are different specific words for your sister's husband/husband's brother/wife's sister/brother's wife/husband's sister/wife's brother - and some of them are different if the sibling in question is older or younger than you or your spouse (and to add to things, many people refer to their first cousins as their brothers and sisters...)
• the one exception we found was that the words for your mother-in-law and father-in-law are the same in both directions.
• when you get married, one's spouse's Abu and Ami (Dad and Mum, informal) also become yours - since your families are now one.

We didn't even get started on aunts/uncles/cousins...

It's obvious how important family relationships are here.  We took heart from the fact that our teachers couldn't remember all the words either!