The rape of the whore and language

Language is a very very strange thing. Especially Indian languages. Some of the words of a language will be similar to a word that means something else in another language.

I hadn’t really understood the full extent of this until I came to Hyderabad. I got to hear so many words here that would mean something very different, and sometimes scandalous, in another language. Like:-

Reppu- It means ‘tomorrow’ in Telugu. The word of often gets shortened to a very simple and plain ‘rape’. You can imagine my shock when I first reached here and heard everyone says ‘Rape rape’, right? :/

Randi- Hold your dirty mind. Let me first translate. ‘Ra’ in Telugu means ‘Come’. ‘Andi’ is used as a term of respect. So ‘Randi’ loosely translates to ‘Please come’.

Now put (1) and (2) together. Say it out loud.

You get what I’m saying about ‘scandalous’? The first time my friend Arun heard this, “Reppu randi”, he was so shocked, he couldn’t speak for a while, which is a record in itself. Then he thought, “What a disgusting place! They discuss so openly about raping! I have GOT to get to know these people better!” Ok, maybe that last bit is not true.

(In case you haven’t got it yet, ‘Randi’ in Hindi means ‘whore’)

But it didn’t stop there. There were some other gems too.

‘Palli’ (with the ‘ll’ pronounced like the sound in ‘love’. Malayalam has two different sounds for l, if not more) in Malayalam means ‘lizard’. So I was sitting at the Necklace road station one night, waiting for the MMTS back home. This old man comes with a basket, calling out ‘Palli palli’. For a minute, I thought I had heard him wrong. But no, he was saying ‘Palli’. I was wondering why he was selling lizards. Was it like a popular snack here? When he came closer, I peeped into the basket and saw that it contained groundnuts, because, well, ‘Palli’ in Telugu means ‘groundnuts’. :/

We had all gone for a field trip to Medak from HCU once. We were at this organic restaurant to have dinner. Some of the boys had finished their first round and were calling for the second round. That’s when my friend S, a Jammu ki kudi, heard one of the boys call out “Pappu pappu!” And she was like, “Arre waah, yeh tho waiter ka naam bhi jaanta hai!” (Oh wow, he knows the waiter’s name also!). Oh it was so much fun to explain to her later that ‘Pappu’ in Telugu means ‘Dal’! :D

I still remember the first time I heard my Punjabi neighbour Aunty’s mom ask “Beta kundi lagaya?” and I cringed. You guys know what ‘kundi’ in Malayalam means, right? It means one’s private parts, or as Russell Peters would say it- Punaani. :P I still laugh whenever anyone uses that word in its Hindi context!

I was also very confused the first time I heard people here use the word ‘Gaali’ for no apparent reason in their conversation. It also turned up in songs. And I genuinely couldn’t understand why ‘Abuse’ would be a part of romantic songs! I later learnt that ‘Galli’ means ‘Air’ or ‘Wind’. :/

There’s this song in Telugu that starts with ‘Kuthire Kuthire’ (‘th’ like the sound in ’the’). And I thought, "Oh nice! A song dedicated to horses." Because that’s what it means in Malayalam. I hadn’t seen the video of the song, so I asked a friend whether the video has horses in it as a backdrop or something. With a pained expression, he explained that ‘Kuthire’ in Telugu means ‘Set ho gaya’, or ‘It’s all set’.

Equally confusing was when I heard “Kallu baagundhi” for the first time in Telugu, which translates into “Eyes are nice”. Kallu in malayalam, with the heavy ‘l’ sound and not the one in ‘love’, means toddy. :/

There are so many more such language mishaps that I can’t recollect right now. But let me tell you, each one of them has left me flummoxed and wondering at those people who were just too lazy to create words for each language, so they threw words from one language to another, and expected us to be ok with it.

Have you had any such experiences with languages?

P.S:- I guest-posted for Keirthana. Please do drop in and have a look. :)