If you have some familiarity with Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, other Southern African languages, or Welsh, then you may have heard my (current) favorite consonant that the human organism can utter.
The name Llewelyn, with its 'll' (often spelled with a second 'll' which does not reflect the pronunciation) and Nelson Mandela's Xhosa name, Rolihlahla with it's 'hl' share this sound. And those rattles hanging in a cascade around the ankles of a Mosotho? They're called Moshuehleshuehle. Say that ten times really fast!
Okay, and for those of my dear readers uninitiated to this aural pleasure/pain, i'll coach you through it if you'll bear with me.
A young boy named Tseliso helped me with this sound when i sounded silly trying to pronounce the name of a park 'Sehlabathebe'. To make the 'hl' first you press your tongue up against the hard palate. Now blow around both sides of your tongue. Oh, try it again and send the air whooshing through the saliva. [Ed. Note: i bet you thought Punkin Runner was going to call it 'salivary amylase'] Make sure there's plenty in there.
Now, recently i got a tip from a sister in China on how to say 'thank you' in Mandarin. I'm not certain, but it sounded like the same sort of sound. So next time i found myself being served bean sprouts and snap peas in a pleasant eatery in Philly i tried out my newly refined 'Shay-shay'. Both the waitress and the host's faces lit up in that way i love, like they had an unexpected visit from home through my 'thankyou'.
I wonder if their relatives lived through the recent earthquakes? I wonder if they even know yet?
1 comment:
Hey P.R.,
Remember when you used to drool? Well, to be fair, you usually slurped and swallowed the saliva before it overflowed. It must be nice to find that the whole tip of Africa and some folks in Wales -not to mention the most populous nation on earth- rely on barrels of that stuff in everyday speech.
Yours,
P.R.
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