How to make bodu-beru

[writinghawk]

Since no-one put in a countervailing request to lillibet's, here is the first of the proffered stories she very wisely chose. I am sure I have written about bodu-beru before, but it is the local form of music, consisting of songs (mostly sung responsively by a leader and everyone else as chorus) sung to the accompaniment of large double-headed drums - '

Comments

[lillibet]

Thank you! That's very interesting.

Do you feel as though you're really learning the language there, or still accumulating vocabulary?

[writinghawk]

Oh, accumulating, alas. I can say some extremely limited things but can't say with certainty even what the basic word order is. The words I do know I can only provisionally say what parts of speech they are, apart from a few unmistakeable verbs and nouns. Parts of speech don't seem to map onto English ones in a very tidy way, and no doubt the hideous mistakes this leads my students to make are matched in my Dhivehi. Such verbs as I do know I can only reliably use what appears to be the present continuous form of, though it's used much more widely than that would suggest. I once elicited a whole load of different forms of a verb with different tense/aspect, but it's highly inflexional so that I wouldn't begin to know how to inflect another verb in the corresponding ways. Thank heaven they don't seem to inflect for person and number.

[writinghawk]

everyone seems to know all the songs, of which there are very many,

Well, up to a point. Shahud was talking to me about them yesterday. There are a number of set drumming rhythms, each song going to one of them - much (it seems to me) as the Irish folk music I play has jigs, reels, hornpipes, slip jigs and so on. They have names which, I think, metrically reflect their first part. One rhythm he said was an 'old rhythm' which isn't played much any more because 'we don't know the words' - he only knows one song in that rhythm, though by implication older people know more. One may wonder why the songs in that rhythm particularly should have faded from view.

Apropos the same point, it's interesting that though I'm told the old folk are the real experts, and that I'll have a great treat at Eid when there is lots of bodu-beru in which they will take part, for the rest of the year it seems to be only young people who play. I suppose they need the practice more.