To say that I am interested in languages is an understatement, as my friends know. Every language that I discover has its own particularities and aspects I like. The almost limitless vocabulary of English, the Chinese characters, the infinite possibilities of forming new words in Arabic, the childhood memories Swedish brings back, Uzbek with its funny agglutinative structure, Japanese and its tons of cool movies, the softness of Russian spoken by my teacher…
Although my attempts at learning Kyrgyz were cut short by the realization that I should probably focus on getting at least my Russian to a halfway useful level, it has grown on me: I will miss the particular melody of Kyrgyz women’s sentences when they express astonishment, for instance, which sounds a bit like the trill in a blackbird’s song. But most of all I like the wonderful interjections of Kyrgyz language:
There’s the “uppah” that you utter when getting up after having sat on a shyrdak for too long and your knees are all sore.
Then the “ou”, a polite way of responding if someone calls your name and which apparently means something like “I love you, what can I do for you?” Nobody pronounces it as gently as my colleague Ainura.
There’s the expressive “ya!”, which (according another colleague of mine, Almaz) either – at the end of a sentence – means “isn’t it?” or “don’t you think so?” or else – standing alone – is the equivalent of “What (did you just say)?” or “Pardon?”.
And then there’s the long-time classic “chön ele” – an almost untranslatable expression somewhere between “just like that”, “for no particular reason”, and “just to have a look / try it out”.
