Vicissitudes of Language in Bhutan

If one looks at a topographical map of Bhutan, one can immediately see how the geography has shaped the culture: with the exception of a few broad valleys, this is a country of very steep mountains and very deep gorges, and, though the size of Switzerland, it still has fewer than a dozen paved inter-provincial (or inter-dzongkhag-al, to be more Bhutanese about it) roads.  The peoples who inhabit these gorges and valleys are extremely isolated, and thus many languages have developed over the centuries independent of one another; each is incomprehensible to the other, though these days many people are multi-lingual, speaking the national language, Dzongkha, as well as Nepali, some English, and possibly one of the other minority languages of Bhutan: Kurthep, Sharchop, Choekyi (classical Tibetan, taught in the monasteries and nunneries), Khengkha, Bumthangkha, Mangdep, or Dzala.

Dzongkha has been the national language since the 17th century but, like Somali, was not a written language until the late 20th century.  Though it uses Tibetan script, the Lonely Planet Guide to Bhutan claims that speakers of Tibetan struggle to understand spoken Dzongkha (though my monk friend who learned Tibetan in his monastery in Nepal seems to have no trouble at all).  To the ear, Dzongkha echoes the chanting of the Buddhist monks; each syllable seems to carry the same amount of emphasis as the next, unlike our own iambic, Latinate/Celtic/Germanic/Norse/French soup of a language.  Lengthier sentences in Dzongkha recapitulate the sound of rocks being tossed down a flight of stairs, each syllable a rock tumbling after the syllable before it (unlike Tamil in South India, which resembled a liquid cascade of sound with no distinguishable beginning or end to each word). To ask 'What is your name?" in Dzongkha, one says, "Chö gi ming ga chi mo?" and each syllable is a word or discrete concept, neither stressed nor unstressed except for the slight upturn in tone at the end to indicate a query.

Needful of basic Dzongkha to manoeuver in the marketplace and villages, I purchased a Dzongkha primer published by the Dzongkha Development Commission.  Though it provides a far greater amount of detail than I can currently manage without a lopen (teacher), it includes the numbers, introductory sentences ("How much does that cost?" chief among them) and sentence stems that will be useful down the road.  Best of all, it is clear that the Dzongkha Development Commission could not afford or could not find an English speaking editor to ensure the accuracy and comprehensibility of the text.  This affords endless fun as one studies one's Dzongkha.  This Dzongkha Rabsel Lamzang (the title itself is untranslated) opens with the following sentence:

"The Dzongkha Development Commission experienced a lot of difficulties in pronouncing Dzongkha words written in Roman English due to the lack of a standard procedure for writing Dzongkha pronunciation in Roman English."

This tautology is proved by the following example: given seven different ways of writing the sound "'Nya" in Dzongkha, though all written the same way in English, and thus seven different pronunciations, we are informed that one of them is "used for honorific ear that is 'Nyen" while another is "used for word honorific happy that is 'Nye".  The last of the seven is "used for hell that is 'Nyewa."  Good to know.

In her amusing memoir about her life in Bhutan, Married to Bhutan, Linda Leaming relates her own struggle to learn Dzongkha from a lopen at the school where she volunteered.  After committing the 30 characters of the Dzongkha alphabet to memory, her lopen informed her that she would now need to learn the 100 consonants that, in combination with the 30 basic letters, make the building blocks of Dzongkha.  As she notes, "This may not sound like a lot, but consider the possible permutations of 100 little attachments on 30 letters.  I'm not now, nor was I then, a mathematician; but I knew I was headed down not only a difficult, bumpy road, but also a very long one."  Lopen Palden taught her the following mnemonic "ditty" to help her remember the first four consonants in combination with some of the letters:

Ka-gee-goo-key

Ka-shab-jew-koo

Ka-dim-bow-kay

Ka-narrow-ko

Here is her explanation of what this Dzongkha nursery rhyme means: "The first syllable is the actual alphabet letter, and the ending syllable is what it becomes when you attach one of four consonants.  "Key" is a little hook that goes on top of the letter [when it is written].  "Koo" is a hook attached to the bottom right.  "Kay" is a kite tail that hangs in the air; "ko" is a little bird that sits on top of the letter." 

She does not venture an explanation for the middle syllables; perhaps that's all for the best.  

As I am beginning to understand, a lot of what is said in Dzongkha in tsongkhangs (shops) and other informal circumstances is ribald or is concerned with drinking.  The Bhutanese are famously lewd, perhaps because of their national hero Drukpa Kinley, the "divine madman" of Bhutan, a likeness of whose penis adorns so many homes and businesses.   Drukpa Kinley used his "thunderbolt" to rid Bhutan of demons and to expose people's hypocrisies; he did so while intoxicated, and not surprisingly drinking is a large part of Bhutanese culture--every family makes their own ara (distilled rice liquor) and bam-chang (an unfiltered drink made from fermented grain). I was more than a little surprised when I was offered a glass of K5, a Bhutanese whiskey made from a malt base imported from Scotland (K5 = the fifth king of Bhutan; it was created in honor of his coronation).  There is also a Bhutan Highland whiskey and a number of Bhutanese ales and lagers, many served in recycled Kingfisher bottles.

Though I do not think I will need to learn to converse with my Bhutanese friends and colleagues about sex, I do want to be able to understand them when they are discussing it, if for no other reason than I want to be in on the jokes.  Drinking vocabulary is indeed useful no matter where one travels, so rather than spend my time with the Dzongkha Rabsel Lamzang trying to unravel the subtleties of 'Nya, I think I'd be better off spending my time in one of the tiny "Restaurant cum Bar"  tsongkhangs that act as the center of village social life.  There, I can get a shot of K5 and some Koka noodles (like ramen) for less than the cost of a pack of gum in the United States, and simultaneously learn the Dzongkha words to describe the drunken and bawdy shenanigans of my village neighbors.  This, and "How much does that cost?" may be all the Dzongkha I need.