Peanuts

I have this memory of my niece, Bailey that I absolutely cherish.  She was just learning how to speak, and Brandy had tried teaching her the word for fork.  Unfortunately, my once-adorable and innocent niece had some trouble pronouncing her R’s.  Instead, she would usually just leave out the R and change the O to a U. Once my sisters and I found this out, it took a lot of effort not to show Bailey a fork and ask her what it was.  It’s really hard not to take advantage of a toddler’s speech impediment when it involves being cussed-out by a one-year old.

The reason I bring this up is because recently, I’ve been having some flashbacks to that moment (come to think of it, I guess I’ve been having a lot of flashbacks recently with all the reminiscing of home…such is life when you are away from it I guess).  Mozambicans just can’t seem to say the word Peanuts.  Instead, without fail, even if someone has never heard another person make the mistake before, their first, second and at least third attempts at saying this word always come out as the world “Penis.”  And it’s freakin’ awesome.

Many of my neighbors like to try to get me to teach them English.  For the record, I hate the idea of teaching English. Like a lot.  The thought of having to teach English makes me want to rip out my fingers one by one and then eat them.  I understand that it’s sort of unavoidable when you are in a foreign country, but still, it doesn’t mean I like having to do it.

Anyways, I’ve tried to find a number of ways to avoid sitting them down and giving classes.  Instead, I prefer to just teach people words on the fly.  For example, if we’re working in the macahamba, I’ll tell them the names of some of the natural features in English: tree, corn, hoe, dirt, etc.  Or, if we’re cooking, I’ll name off some of the things we’re using: fire, stove, pan, water, etc.  Usually, people around here have a lot of difficultly pronouncing things.

Oddly, this makes a lot of sense when you think about the fact that the physical structure of the local languages here are an amalgamation of a completely different set of sounds (that’s not to say there aren’t some similarities).  A classic example is the language that involves the tongue clicking.  I think it’s Swahili, but I’m not totally sure.  In any case, it’s really hard, but not impossible, to learn how to speak this way.  It just takes practice.  Native speakers have no trouble with these sounds, kind of like how a native English speaker has no trouble pronouncing the words old, hold, or near.  Not the case here though.  When someone who has no experience with a language composed of sounds that are unique to them, they are unable to pronounce words in the correct manner.  And sometimes, this leads to fantastic mistakes.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder if that’s why people are always laughing at me here when I try to speak Macua.  Maybe every time I reply to something, I’m really just saying the Macua word for some ridiculous body part.  I hope not, I’ve been trying to talk with a lot of respected community members.

(All of a sudden I really miss that Tibetan Take-Out place on the corner of Folsom and Arapahoe in Boulder.  Maybe it’s because I always tried to order my food using the name of the dish on the menu and they’d always laugh at me when I tried.)