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http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1123/p01s … .html]This is way cool, IMHO.
GURGAON, INDIA – Turn on any Indian television station these days and you're likely to hear things like "Hungry kya?" and "What your bahana is?"
Or one of your friends might ask you to "pre-pone" your dinner plans or accuse you of "Eve-teasing."
and these
To get an idea of what the tamasha (ruckus) is all about, listen to a typical Hinglish advertisement.
Pepsi, for instance, has given its global "Ask for more" campaign a local Hinglish flavor: "Yeh Dil Maange More" (the heart wants more). Not to be outdone, Coke has its own Hinglish slogan: "Life ho to aisi" (Life should be like this).
Domino's Pizza, which offers Indian curiosities such as the chicken tikka pizza, asks its customers "Hungry kya?" (Are you hungry?), and McDonald's current campaign spoofs the jumbled construction of Hinglish sentences with its campaign, "What your bahana is?" (Bahana means excuse, as in, "What's your excuse
for eating McDonald's and not home-cooked food?")
and these
Indians have always had a way with English words. Sexual harassment, for instance, is known as "Eve-teasing." Mourners don't give condolences, they "condole." And then there's "pre-pone," the logical but nonexistent opposite of "post-pone": "I'm busy for dinner. Can we pre-pone for lunch instead?"
Different Indian cities have their own Hinglish words. In Bombay, men who have a bald spot with a fringe of hair all around are called "stadiums," as in "Hey stadium, you're standing on my foot."
Edited By BWhite on 1107909624
Give someone a sufficient [b][i]why[/i][/b] and they can endure just about any [b][i]how[/i][/b]
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Spanglish, Hinglish, Engrish, yeesh, it's like Latin fracturing into a bazillion languages.
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I love it. The French would never tolerate this; that's why they have less than a hundred million native speakers around the world! When people make English their own, that's when it will grow, because it will no longer be seen as foreign.
-- RobS
P.S.: Reminds me of a visit to Israel in 1988. I was walking down the street, enjoing the signs in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, sometimes reading the Hebrew from the Arabic based on some of the Persian that I know. I remember there was a pharmacy next to a bank and their doors were next to each other. The pharmacy door had a hand-lettered sign on it "It is not a bank here." You immediately knew what was happening; the doors were being mixed up. I thought it was great that the shop owner felt so comfortable in English he'd create his own "Heblish" sign.
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"Condole", I may start using that one. Don't much care for "pre-pone" though.
Interesting at any rate.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
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One of the more sweetly touching movies I have ever watched was "Tortilla Soup" - - lots of great cooking as well, I left the theater pretty darn hungry.
Anyway, a proud Hispanic father in Los Angeles was continually yelling at his young very successful professional children:
"Speak English, or speak Spanish. Either one, I don't care. Just don't mix them up!"
Give someone a sufficient [b][i]why[/i][/b] and they can endure just about any [b][i]how[/i][/b]
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http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/ … ]Taikonaut
Another word with mixed origins.
"Taikong" is a Chinese word that means space or cosmos. The resulted prefix "taiko-" is similar to "astro-" and "cosmo-" that makes three words perfectly symmetric, both in meaning and in form. Removing "g" from "taikong" is to make the word short and easy to pronounce. On the other side, its pronounciation is also close to "taikong ren", the Chinese words "space men".
Taikong-naut blends a Chinese root with "naut" to create a word having Chinese/English origins.
No big deal, except that I think its cool!
Edited By BWhite on 1108317358
Give someone a sufficient [b][i]why[/i][/b] and they can endure just about any [b][i]how[/i][/b]
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