Monday, April 17, 2006

A New Level of Jealousy!

Not being a "language person," I realize that it is as much my fault as anyone else’s that I have yet to hold anything remotely resembling a substantive conversation in Tamazight! Absolutely, I can understand and answer questions like, "Where did you go?" "What time is it?" or "What did you eat?" And of course I am quite adept at saying "I’m sorry, I don’t understand"!

Occasionally, well, sometimes more than occasionally, I find myself frustrated by an apparent lack of tact or nuance in the language as well. For example, it is difficult to express degrees of ability, need, or emotion. There is either "a lot," "a little," or "none." And while there is "better" and "worse" (although I have been advised to be careful on with the latter, because if you linger a little to long over one consonant, it sounds more like an offensive bodily function!), it is sometimes difficult to express "more," or "less" in exactly the way we’d mean it in English. With all this, not only do I often feel incapable of expressing myself as specifically as I might in English (even if I did speak better Tamazight), but I often find myself feeling unnecessarily offended by what appear to be rather blunt statements made to me ("You don't know anything!")!

That said, Tamazight also has a range of bizarrely specific words - verbs in particular. There is actually a verb (a single word) for the act of scraping meat off of bones with your teeth. But most interesting to me, during a recent tutoring session, was learning the word that roughly describes our concept of jealousy or envy. For us, those ideas - the latter in particular - suggest a notion of "I want what you have." The Tamazight word, "lshrah," however, carries a far nastier connotation (not that we don’t sometimes think of it this way in English as well). If you feel lshrah towards someone, it means, simply, "I don’t want you to have what you have."

Normally, I am fascinated by the idea of what the specifics of a language say about its culture, but I am learning that, when you’re living in the middle of it, sometimes it is best to take what lessons you want from such things, but try not to dwell on it!