Prosody

All languages have a sound. A cadence and a rhythm. That thing that tells you what the language is, even if you don't understand what's being said. They thing that lets you say, "Fu, fu. Quack, quack," and know it is the French Canadians being referenced. It is more than just vocabulary. It is the tone, and more importantly, intonation. (Don't listen to anyone who says English isn't a tonal language; it is. Tone carries a lot of weight and meaning in English. But unlike Chinese where tone conveys denotation — the dictionary definition of the word, in English, tone conveys connotation — or how the speaker feels about the word.) It is the meter of a language. English is iambic, which is partly why we find Shakespeare to be the epitome of English verse: he stressed (ha ha) how English sounds.

There is, on YouTube, a video that attempts to describe what non-speakers of English hear when they hear English. (I'd look it up for you, but I continue to find myself without easy access to the Internet. Maybe I'll fix it later.) But, if you are reading this, you can go look it up. Don't worry, I'll wait for you to get back. Just ignore the somewhat ridiculous 80s fashion and enjoy the sound.

The word for all this (English has nothing if not a lot of vocabulary) is prosody.

When I arrived in Indonesia, I listened to the prosody of the language. I also searched through my Books for the name of the language — surely there must be something beyond just Indonesian. And with so many islands, maybe there is more than one language?

Well, some searching and reading later, I learned that there is a name: Bahasa. It is similar to Malay. Also, while Bahasa is the official language, and all Indonesians speak it, there are also local languages. So, a good traveler might learn how to say thank you in not just Bahasa, but also Balinese. As is English, Spanish, German, and Mandarin weren't enough. (Incidentally, in China, my default second language is Spanish which I know more of than Mandarin. But here, where I know almost no Bahasa, I default to Mandarin, sprinkling my phrases with xie xie and hao de.

But, back to the subject at hand, or mouth, as it were.

Bahasa is a lively language. It is not a tonal language, and in its written form, it is rather regular, making it relatively easy to learn (so I am told). As I've mentioned before, the r's are all rolled, giving it a lilting, breezy feel, but there are plenty of p's and b's and ch's, along with some sounds swallowed at the end of a word, making it sound like popping corn.

And that is what I hear the most, besides the lovely way my name rolls off a rolling r tongue. Popcorn. Pop pop pop pop.


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Location:Gili Meno, Indonesia