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Web Exclusives | Bombs to the Eyebrows |
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| Written by Leah Pillsbury | |||||
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What University Language Classes Reveal about Culture “Pitzazot lagabot” – literally, “bombs to the eyebrows” – is the first Israeli expression that I ever learned. In my intermediate Hebrew class this week, I learned the words for “suicide bomber” and “terrorist attack,” but in my Swahili class, I am teaching words like “give” and “dance.” I am in my second year of both studying Hebrew and teaching introductory Swahili discussion sections at Harvard. The two languages are more similar than you might think: about 30 percent of Swahili vocabulary is derived directly from Arabic, and Hebrew and Arabic share a lot of words. For example, the slang word yaani (“like, ya know”) is used in exactly the same way in all three languages. Though these languages have cognates, however, I have come to realize the dramatically different world views that they are used to express. As a discussion section leader for beginner Swahili students, I teach students new ways to say “good;” my Hebrew teacher teachers us multiple ways to say “I’m fed up” or “I don’t feel like doing this.” The other day, I asked her why we kept learning such negative phrases, to which she responded, “Hakol lo gan eden” (“Everything isn’t the Garden of Eden”). It may be true that life isn’t paradise, but that attitude won’t make life any better, either. I spend at least a week teaching students appropriate formal and informal Swahili greetings, because greeting is essential to all East African cultures where Swahili is spoken. If you don’t greet someone properly from the start, you might as well forget about having the rest of a conversation. Some responses to Swahili greetings are poa, safi, freshi, salama, nzuri, njema, all of which constitute some form of “good.” Students always ask what they can say if they want to answer “bad.” In Swahili, such a negative answer is not appropriate. Politeness is such an important aspect of Swahili that it is often viewed as rude to merely say the word for “please.” Naomba, “I beg of you,” is more commonly accepted. I am neither Israeli nor East African, though I have lived in both regions and I know that both have their hardships; Tanzania is one of the poorest countries in the world, while Israel is one of the most stressed out. But you can bet that language use has an impact on how people react to these hardships. If you answer every Swahili greeting with “good,” no matter how you feel, after a couple greetings you start to feel better than when you started answering. As someone who lives safely in America, I am in no position to tell Israelis to be less cynical, but I don’t think that using the expression nimas li (“I’m fed up”) all the time makes them any happier.
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