Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 11:15PM When reading articles in Tamil on the iPhone, the font is messed up. The same pages load okay on Firefox and internet explorer.
Considering that the fonts are in UNICODE, it does not make any sense on why this is..
If any of you iPhone Tamil news readers / Bloggers have figured out an answer, kindly let me know.
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Monday, March 15, 2010 at 9:12PM Now that translates word for word from Tamlish to:
Daddy, she is farting!
When you have a household that speaks a mixed tongue, where words that are neither here nor there make up more than 30% of the vocabulary, life gets to be interesting.
The English speaking folks can only understand part of the conversation. The grand parents and relatives in India look puzzled in the video chats over the weekend because they are not sure if they heard things right. The only people who understand the kids and the parents in conversations are other kids raised in America or parents raising their kids in America who have the exact same mother tongue.
Yes. A tamlish kid speaks a different dialect than a Kannadlish or Telugish kid.
Much like a North Indian will perceive all south Indian languages to be similar sounding and lump them all as one, a Hindlish parent or kid might lump all these dialects as one.
That said, it is really funny when the parents also start talking like the kids!
Why we do it is beyond me. Maybe we think it will be easier to get through to them? We think it is cute? It makes sense being Tamil speaking people in America and somehow optimizes the total number of words that have to be spoken to convey the meaning in both languages simultaneously?!
We speak sentences like
"Appa, can you come pal thEch me?" = Daddy, can you come teeth brush me?
"Appa, the meen is kutty pOtting!" = Daddy, the fish is baby dropping!
etc.
Nakking (licking), kudiching (drinking), thodaching (wiping dry), etc. are one set of variants where the verb starts of in Tamil but ends up as some kind of gerund with the "ing" ending.
Then there are the variations like "doneaa?" which gets a response "donnu!" where the english word gets the Tamil ending added to it to convey question vs. answer, active or passive voice, or tense!
doneaa = are you done ?
Donnu = yes I am!
This is how a tamizh concept gets ported over to Tamlish
There is one more variant.
"Daddy, can you kadichy saap my tummy?" which kind of translates to :
"Daddy, can you bite eat my tummy?" which is their way of saying
"Daddy, can you blow raspberries on my tummy?"
Note that Kadichy is close to Kadichu (or bitten), but saap is shortened for Saaptu (eaten). Now when two action words are chained back to back, the second one gets chopped. An English concept now gets carried over to Tamlish!
Sometimes, we are misunderstood, but mostly we get the best of both worlds!
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English, Language, Tamizh, Tamlish, lingustics, tamil, things kids do, things kids say Friday, May 1, 2009 at 9:45PM Watched Abhiyum Naanum on DVD. It was a great movie. Came out teary eyed in a lot of places. First real sappy daddy movie to hit the screens in a long time.
Even the big girls were all wiping their tears, possibly thinking about their dads?!
Most of the things in that movie have happened for real in this house. The girls as much as utter a sound, daddy will be right next to them. The alert level in the house for the girls getting hurt is always at Orange, much like the San Jose Airport since a few weeks after 9/11. Daddy is still designing airbags in his sleep that will make sure that there are no scratches on the kids if they get in an accident.
If this movie captured our past and present very accurately, then it is offering a very scary glimpse of the future for daddy.
There is a lot of growing up to do, for sure.
Just remembered this post and the comments that followed! It is not going to be easy for me to see my girls say bye to me.
Funny thing is they already know that they can live without me but it is me who cannot live without them and this theme came as a self realization way before this movie was made!
Hell, I should have scripted this movie. Okay, just kidding..
Those occasional flashes of truth fade into the background in an instant and we are back to the "my child" obsession.
One thing is for sure. I treat my FIL with a lot of respect. He is the only person who could put things in perspective for me when my kids decide to get married. Not my wife, not my parents, not my kids. Only the FIL can give me advice on what it means to become a FIL myself someday.
Maybe he has no profound wisdom to offer me and will brush it aside with stuff like "achcha baba" or "chalta hai" or some such thing which leaves you staring into space going "what was that?" , or maybe he will take me aside and bare his soul on what he was thinking at my wedding....or maybe he will start a school for prospective FIL's and offer coaching classes?
Only time will tell.
Hopefully by that time, this dad will be wiser. One can always hope, no?
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daddy, growing up, indian movies, marriage, perspective, tamil Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 10:22PM Wishing you all a very happy Tamizh new year!
இனிய புத்தாண்டு நல் வாழ்த்துக்கள் !!
Thanks to the Natesan's for giving them "matching" dresses for their Birthday!
Today's dressing session brought back memories of me and my brother, when we were the same age!
Wait, if you are thinking.. "oh so cute. Sundar and his brother must have worn matching outfits as kids!", you are way off base. There is only some truth to it!
When we were kids, our family went through tough times because my dad who worked in the insurance business was going through a labor strike. He did not have many choices. It was either sit at the picket line and forego pay or be ostracized. He chose picket lines, and that meant no pay! So we moved out of our big rental house to a small asbestos roofed shed the entire year of my 3rd grade(3rd standard!).
Naturally, there were no new clothes and we would end up getting new school uniforms stiched for diwali and no new clothes on our birthday. Somehow our parents made us understand what we were going through. For the next two three years, they were making a slow comeback, and that meant identical clothes for the two boys!
They would take us to Bombay Dyeing shop in Luz Corner and buy the same cloth by the meter and invariably ask the question "how much for him and how much for the little guy?". My brother and me would protest, take my parents to opposite ends of the shop to pick different patterns but invariably economics would take over. For a long time I used to see those books on my dad's shelf which said "Macro Economics - by Taylor" and would think that the guy at Art Land Tailors in Luz corner wrote those books!
Same pattern, same clothes and worse for my brother, he would get my hand me downs, which meant he would end up wearing the same pattern for another year or two. The horror! For some reason the parents, the relatives and even family friends would think this was "cute". Hopefully we were really cute, and they weren't laughing behind our backs. The phase finally came to an end, when I went to high school and my brother was as tall as me and eventually became taller than me. He was probably praying every day for some miracle by which the matching outfit, hand me down horror would end and was glad that it did.
Today it was so different watching the two girls, so happy to be wearing the same dress. Guess that is one of those things where, girls are different from boys!
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Tamizh, dressing up, happy new year, matching, outfits, tamil Saturday, March 29, 2008 at 8:51AM It is common these days to see Indian movies blatantly copy foreign movies with a small twist in the end. For some reason, the entire scene by scene lifting of another movie has reduced drastically in the last year.
The new trend is to just recreate segments of hit western or south east asian movies. Segments as in, a series of stunt sequences, family situations, drama situations etc. Needless to say, if they never gave any credit to the original after copying an entire movie, they are not going to give any credit for copying segments.
The funny thing is the arguments between me and the Mrs. on these sequences. Somehow she manages to forget the original sequence and is amazed by the creativity of the Director or actor or cinematographer! That gets to me more than the director. It is easier for me to show relation to the original when the source of the sequences is another Indian movie.
For example, the movie we watched recently can be expressed with the equation:
Thotaa = Thotti Jaya + Fanaa - Chimpu
where Chimpu is the fudge factor, or in movie terms the sludge factor!
Here is another sequence:
Hero is cornered on a high rise building
He is standing on the parapet wall on the top floor looking down
The old and wise cop is puffing and panting but nevertheless has a gun pointed at the hero
Cop delivers a dialogue about how the entire building is surrounded and it is "surrender" or "death by falling"!
Hero lets cop count
Just as cop counts one hero spots a train in a distance. (the tracks are not even close to the building, but what the hell!)
When the cop counts three, there is a .5 second pause and the hero falls, arms out
Then we see the rope he is holding
He swings a distance of around half a mile and precisely lands on the top of the train.
The hero looks back and smiles
The old cop who looks like he needs eye glasses rated +5.5 in the right eye and +6.5 in the left, gives a wry smile and identifies the hero's face from the train top a mile away..
Familiar??? Lets see what you think the original is!
Here is another one.
Boy comes to girls parents house to be introduced.
Boy has just lost his job before joining girl on the trip
He needs money
The prospective father in law figures out that he has money troubles
So they have a race (running, go-cart, whatever) and if the boy wins the girls dad will loan him the money, if not the boy should leave the girl alone and walk away!
In the same movie girl stops talking to boy because he hid his "losing the job" part from her. Eventually boy helps girls dad join girls mom (they are fighting as well) and the parents help girl join boy! The director of the Tamizh copy is even supposed to have attributed the sequence to a wrong original! If you are a movie trivia buff name the original, copy and the wrong original mentioned in the media..
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