Sylvia's Journal

I had my second Dari lesson today. Actually the first was at the beginning of the day when I was asked to say a few words at the opening of the second workshop in a serious of four to help provincial staff for the province of Kabul act more like managers and leaders. When you are asked to give a speech it is called ‘hitting words’ if you were to translate the Dari literally. So I hit some words, mostly in English, but I can now say in Dari that I am very happy to see a significant number of women in the room. It was significant indeed, more than one third. People from countries where the sexes mingle freely have no idea how exciting that is (and how unusual).

My Dari teacher came to my office and we practiced verbs. I get to pick the verbs I want to learn. Since I am moving in a few weeks I asked how to say that I will be moving from guesthouse zero to guesthouse 33. This how I learned that moving from one house to another is, literally, ‘doing nomad.’ So now I can say that in a few weeks I will do nomad. The word for nomad as koch, as in Kochis, the nomads who crisscross Afghanistan in their brightly colored clothes.

I also learned that getting cold in Dari is expressed by saying that I eat (ingest) cold. It is so interesting to learn these expressions that reveal something about the way people think about natural or physical phenomena.

I made a few mispronunciations that are awkward in public because the bad words and good words closely resemble each other. My teacher started to giggle when I said something that, as he later explained, was like a four-letter English word (he couldn’t get himself to tell me which one, but I guessed) if I pronounced it with an ‘ah’ rather than an ‘oh’ or vice versa. Now of course I never dare to use the intended and innocent word again out of fear that I say the unintended and offensive word.