![\"\"](\"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/~bgzimmer\/badshits.jpg\" "\\"Click")
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Son Ha helped us so much with these two posts: \"Unknown Language #7<\/a>,\" \"Unknown Language #7: update<\/a>.\" Damak is a town in eastern Nepal where Son Ha works in a refugee camp and where he encountered the woman who is featured in those two posts.<\/p>\n I don't think that \"bad shits\" requires extensive comment, though I will say that the fine gradations of English vowels seem to pose a lot of problems for nonnative speakers.\u00a0 For example, my wife always had a devil of a time distinguishing among \"pin, pain, pine, and pen\".\u00a0 On the other hand, I had trouble clearly differentiating certain consonants in Nepali, e.g., \u091a\u00a0\/c, t\u0361\u0283\/\u00a0and \u091b\u00a0\/c\u02b0, t\u0361\u0283\u02b0\/, such that the initials of\u00a0c\u0101r\u00a0\u091a\u093e\u0930\u00a0(\"four\")\u00a0and cha \u091b\u00a0(\"six\") came out sounding very much alike, resulting in amusement on the part of my Nepali friends.\u00a0 (You can hear recordings of the two words here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n And I also found it challenging to differentiate the three sibilants:\u00a0 \u0936 \u015ba \/\u0255, \u0283\/, \u0937 \u1e63a \/\u0282\/, and \u0938 sa \/s\/. [Note that the \u2018s\u2019 in the devanagari for \u201cfurnishing\u201d is not the palatal \u2018sh\u2019 but the dental \u2018s\u2019; more on that below.]<\/p>\n Here's the transliteration of the main part of the shop sign:<\/p>\n mani\u1e63\u0101 pharnisi\u1e45g sen\u1e6dar<\/p>\n damak 11, pharnicar l\u0101\u012bn phon \u2026<\/p>\n (Manisha Furnishing Center, Damak 11 [I believe that is the \"ward\" number for Nepali addresses], furniture phone line…)<\/p>\n Manisha<\/a> is a female name associated with a goddess of wisdom. It may be the name of the store owner or, perhaps more likely, a reference to the famous Nepali actress, Manisha Koirala<\/a>. The next two words are obviously borrowed from English.<\/p>\n According to Philip Lutgendorf:<\/p>\n The Devanagari transliteration contains two \u201cerrors\u201d (of a sort common in such signage).\u00a0 One is the misspelling of \u201cFurnishing\u201d with the sibilant \u201csa\u201d rather than \u201c\u015ba\u201d or \u201c\u1e63a\u201d (as one would expect), though such substitution is common in Eastern Hindi and probably in Nepali as well; the reader will pronounce it \u201csha\u201d in any case. The other is the use of the dental \u201cna\u201d as a conjunct with retroflex \u201c\u1e6da\u201d (in\u00a0Sen\u1e6dar<\/i>). This is theoretically impossible according to Sanskrit rules; it should be\u00a0Se\u1e47\u1e6dar<\/i>\u00a0(\u0938\u0947\u0902\u091f\u0930 or\u00a0\u0938\u0947\u0923\u094d\u091f\u0930), but again, popular signage doesn\u2019t give a…..sheet….about such niceties!<\/p>\n The conjunct for \u201cng\u201d uses the optional orthography, derived from Sanskrit, of representing the nasal of the glottal class by\u00a0<\/i>a full character normally avoided in modern Hindi (which would generally prefer a superscript dot or\u00a0anusv\u0101r<\/i>, to yield \u092b\u093c\u0930\u094d\u0928\u093f\u0938\u093f\u0902\u0917…).<\/p>\n I asked Leopold Eisenlohr if the last biconsonantal conjunct of the second word (\"furnishing\") of the sign is exactly equivalent to\u00a0\u0919\u094d\u0917.\u00a0 He replied:<\/small><\/small><\/big><\/big><\/p>\n