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Joshua Jacobs

Sep 27

Travel Tuesday: Mahalo, Hawai’i!

September 27th, 2011 by Leave A Comment

My wife and I recently had the privilege of traveling to our 50th state, Hawaiʻi.  While every state in the contiguous United States offers its own unique slant on what makes our great country what it is, Hawaiʻi and Alaska in particular have long held an allure due to their geographic rejosh 200x150 Travel Tuesday: Mahalo, Hawaii!moteness and utterly unique histories as compared with the rest of the nation.  Having visited Alaska back in March (yes, it was cold, but having grown up in northern lower Michigan and my wife having grown up in eastern Ukraine we’re used to this stuff) it seemed to make sense to hit Hawaiʻi next.  And so we did…

Hawaiʻi holds the distinction of being one of the most naturally awe inspiring places on the planet.  While the exotic nature of Hawaiʻi may seem obvious due to its location and climate, for some reason what we were in for didn’t really dawn on me until I began researching all the spectacular things to do and see once we got there.  With many different islands to choose from, each with its own unique scenery and history, it was challenging to fit so many exciting experiences into a 4 day trip.

I’ll spare you the brutal details of the flight in.  It’s probably obvious how one feels after spending 12 hours on multiple airliners traversing a country and an ocean (we flew out of Detroit).  Upon landing and exiting the plane for the concourse I was immediately struck by the flavor of the “island” lifestyle.  This includes open-air hallways, warm breezes, tall palm trees swaying in the wind, and comfortably humid air.  Being notoriously un-well traveled, I had never been in the tropics before.  I’d been to the Bahamas once, but this was something different altogether.  I was prepared for scorching hot temperatures and scalp-frying sun, but the weather was actually some of the mildest, most beautiful I had ever experienced.  I don’t think it ever got warmer than 85 degrees the entire time we were there and the temperatrure averaged around 75 degrees.

Anyway, what we did while we were there:  Since we’re not really “touristy” types, we chose to do things that gave us the opportunity to experience Hawaiʻi as authentically as possible.  Sure, there were the occasional “tourist traps” (like the lava tube on Maui), but generally it was a lot of being outdoors and enjoying nature.  For the most part, our trip was confined to the island of Maui.  We had discussed the possibility of making a trip to Oʻahu to see the Pearl Harbor Memorial, Diamond Head, the beaches, and so forth but decided it would have probably been more difficult than it was worth to charter a plane and all that.  However, Maui proved to be so chock-full of amazing things to see that we didn’t feel like were missing a thing.  A brief list of what we did includes a flight-seeing tour of the island of Hawaiʻi (known locally as “The Big Island”) which included amazing waterfalls, coastal valleys, the caldera of Kilauea, and a flight between the two big volcanoes Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea before returning back to the airport in Maui, a drive up to the top of Haleakala (the dormant volcano which makes up ¾ of the island of Maui) to view the Martian-like terrain inside of the crater, a drive on the Hana highway which is known worldwide as one of the most scenic stretches of road anywhere, visits to several coastal towns for snorkeling, sailing, and a variety of on-foot activities, and fresh mahi-mahi and pineapple for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day we were there.  There are few things I enjoy more than fresh fish for a meal.

A note on the Hawaiian language.  Something else I thought was kind of neat and wasn’t quite prepared for was the degree to which the local inhabitants recognize, respect, and embrace their ethnic Hawaiian roots.  Many signs in local businesses (like Burger King) were printed in English AND Hawaiian and being greeted with the ubiquitous “aloha” and thanked with “mahalo” was a pleasant surprise for somebody who was used to hearing very few languages in day to day life other than English and Russian.

In summary, Hawaiʻi is a fantastic place to visit for anybody who’s looking for an exotic vacation offering a different climate, geography, culture, and language, but who isn’t quite prepared for the need to learn a new language to get around or who doesn’t want to be tethered to a foreign language phrasebook the entire trip.  Plus, because it’s in the United States, there is no visa required!  I’m convinced that there’s something there for everybody and we hope to make it back at some point in our lives.

Been to Hawaiʻi?  Got any experience learning or speaking the Hawaiian language?  Tell us about it.

Apr 20

Lunch Time Linguistic Gymnastics

April 20th, 2010 by Leave A Comment

India 271x300 Lunch Time Linguistic GymnasticsHaving worked in Information Technology for many years now, I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know and be good friends with many people from India who have been gracious enough to share their thoughts with me on culture and language.  In particular, something that piqued my interest very quickly was learning about the linguistic versatility which is such a prominent feature in Indian life.  Allow me to explain.

When I was new to the company in which I began my IT career, I was sort of “adopted” by a group of friends who all happened to be from India.  This group of us would have lunch together just about every day at precisely 12 PM, and, in addition to being an opportunity for a meal, it was also a great opportunity for being social.  Being the only person at the table whose sole language was English, I often found myself staring at my lunch, at the ceiling, or into space as several different, exotic (at least to my ears) sounding languages flew back and forth across the table.   It was never awkward at all. Rather, they were sub-conversations within the context of a larger conversational experience which included us all.  Having married into a family which came to America from the Ukraine and speaks Russian at home, I was sort of used to politely grinning at mealtime while similar sub-conversations took place that I could not understand.  But this was a little bit more dynamic because there were clearly several languages at play here, and the use of each seemed to change depending on the situation, context, and speakers.   What gives?   Curiosity forced me to find out as much as I could. First, a little background:

Without making too broad a generalization, it seems that most everybody from India knows two languages: English and their “mother-tongue.”  Held over from British colonial rule, English is still in active use in primary education, government institutions, and everyday life.  On the other hand, the “mother-tongue” can best be understood as the local language that is spoken at home while growing up and there are a great variety of these languages across the Indian subcontinent. Assuming it is common among family members, the applicable mother-tongue continues to be the language spoken at home by most Indians while living in America.   Additionally, many Indians know three languages: English, their mother-tongue, and Hindi.  Hindi, along with English, is the other national language of India and tends to serve as the native lingua franca across certain parts of the country.  Lastly, some Indians know four or more languages with the addition of a second or third mother-tongue due to having parents from different regions of the country, or from having themselves grown up in multiple regions of the country.

Getting back to the story, it didn’t, as I said, take me too long to realize there were many layers of complexity and nuance making up the conversations of our group.  After a while I felt comfortable enough to ask about why there were so many different languages being used and what determined their use.  It was explained to me that, for conversational purposes, the language of choice was determined mainly by regionality (possessing a shared mother-tongue) and that another language common to both would be used if there was no common mother-tongue.  This seemed very practical and made sense to me.  Instinctively, I would certainly rather communicate with the language I most comfortably spoke given the choice.

Within our particular group, here is how the linguistic dynamics would play out: there were four in our group who were all from around the city of Chennai (formerly Madras) on India’s southeast coast.  Chennai is the primary city in the province of Tamil Nadu, and the mother-tongue of this particular region is a Dravidian language called Tamil.  When speaking conversationally to one another, these four would always use Tamil.  The other two from our group (besides me) were from a province to the north of Tamil Nadu called Andhra Pradesh.  In this region and around the city of Hyderabad, the predominant mother-tongue is another Dravidian language known as Telugu and this is the language they would converse in with one another.  After a while I became quite familiar with this pattern but noticed something which stood out to me.   Of the two whose mother-tongue was Telugu, one would generally switch and speak in Tamil when conversing with the other Tamil speakers.   However, in the same situation the other would always switch to English. This made me awfully curious, particularly because he and one of the Tamil speakers were best friends and always hung out together.  After I thought about this for a minute it dawned on me that I’d only ever heard them speak to each other in English. Just when I thought I had the rules of the game all figured out I was stumped.

Seeking clarification, I asked about this one day.  As it turns out, the first of my Telugu speaking friends actually spent part of his youth in an area where Tamil is widely spoken.  Thus, he had a command of both Tamil and Telugu in addition to the relatively ubiquitous English and Hindi.   Truly a polyglot!  As for why our other Telugu speaking friend didn’t do the same, I learned that due to the region he was from he did not have command of Hindi or Tamil as neither language was widely spoken.  Only English and Telugu were widely spoken.  That meant that his only common language with the others was English.  Simply put, it had never occurred to me before that moment that English could ever be the lone mutually understood language among those from a country so far away from where the English language originated.  Astonished as I was at this, it simply goes to show how complex the linguistic gymnastic act can become in a part of the world highlighted by such a high degree of linguistic diversity.  When it comes to language, those of us who have only ever needed to know how to speak English seem to have it easy indeed.

Have you had a similar experience? Please comment and share!

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