The Malagasy Language (Part I?)

If there were a movie made about my life, there would be no shortage of literary irony, the state in which the viewer or reader sees the significance of an event or action of which the character in said work is completely unaware. It's one of the few things that would make the movie intriguing.

Probably about three years ago, I took a French course in college titled “Building Castles in the Sand” where we studied the French speaking islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Our focus was on Tahiti and some other islands in the Polynesian region, but we also had a substantial unit on Madagascar because, not only is it a francophone country, but it also remains culturally and ethnically connected to Indonesia and other islands and island people from the Pacific and Eastern Indian Oceans. Anyways, we studied Madagascar’s history, literature, and key figures as well as the importance of several cultural artifacts like the lamba, zebu, the ancestors, and others. When it came time for our petit intero (quiz), my professor mentioned that there would be an extra credit question associated with a few of the Malagasy phrases we had learned during class as something fun but not really essential to the course as a whole.

In my most brilliant arrogance, I thought to myself, “Pshh! I’m not going to spend time memorizing the Malagasy phrases of how to say hello. I don’t need the extra credit. It’s just a waste of my time because I will never use those phrases.”

There is no true way to describe how wrong I was.

To be fair, I did ace the quiz without the extra credit. Nonetheless, I had no idea that some three years later I would be using salama and manahoana nearly 15-20 times a day to say hello. Moreover, I would never have guessed that I would actually spend time in the only place that Malagasy is spoken. So if you have ever doubted that God has a sense of humor, I ask that you reconsider.

Someone once told me that after you learn 3 languages, any you pick up afterwards is pretty easy. I didn’t believe it until this past summer when I began learning American Sign Language (ASL), Spanish, and Malagasy. It was at this point that I finally realized what this person meant. Once you’ve learned 3 languages, you are so familiar with the concept of grammar, the process of learning a language, your own learning styles, strong points, weak points, and how to begin changing your process of thinking, that learning a new language becomes incredibly easier, especially if the new language is similar or of the same family as one you already speak.

Unfortunately, Malagasy is nothing like the Indo-European languages I’ve learned before. In fact, because the Malagasy people are descendants of Indonesians and some Bantu Africans, their language is most similarly related to a dialect of Indonesian on the island of Borneo. This means there are a lot of differences in grammar, few cognates or familiar words, and a completely new way of visualizing what is important when speaking. Let me give you a short crash-course in Malagasy to show you what I mean.

Pronouns are easy enough, so let’s start there:

Aho – I

Ianao­ – you (singular)

Izy ­– he/she/it

Isika – we (when the speaker includes the interlocutor, the person being spoken to. Also called the inclusive.)

Izahay – we (when the speaker excludes the interlocuter. Also called the exclusive.)

Ianareo – you (plural)

Izy ireo – they

There is no number or gender. This means that ny trano means a single house or several houses. There is no way to know whether the word is plural or singular other than context, if you’re lucky to get some.

There is also no definite or indefinite article. This means that ny labiera means “a beer” or “the beer”. Again, there is no telling which it means unless you have context.

Malagasy is a Verb-Object-Subject (VOS) language which means the structure of a basic sentence starts with the verb (normally), proceeded by the object (normally), and then ends with the subject (normally).

For example:

Mamaky boky aho – read book I (I read the book)

This basic sentence structure looks odd at first, but it’s relatively easy to use. The problems begin once you start adding more details to your sentences, such as adding time or locative prepositions and locations. Malagasy is a very spatial language. This means there is heavy emphasis on being clear about the exact nature of the speaker’s location in space and the location being spoken about. Let me explain with the two most common locative prepositions: eto and any.

Eto kind of means “here” but only in a very general way, such as a town, country, neighborhood, or a place that takes up an undefined spatial boundary. You can only use it if you are actually in the place you’re talking about. Any, on the other hand, kind of means “over there” referring to a place of a similar nature as described in eto but not where the speaker is.

This is how I would use them:

Mipetraka eto Madagasikara aho. – I live here in Madagascar.

Mipetraka any Amerika ianao. – You live there in America.

Of course, not all places are spatially undefinable, which means we need to add another, the most common, locative preposition, amin’ny, to make sure the listener knows the speaker is talking about something like a building or defined location.

This is how we would use them:

Mipetraka eto amin’ny tranoko aho. – I live here in my house.

Miantsena any amin’ny tesena aho. – I go shopping there in the market.

That’s just the basics.

A bonus is that the only conjugation that takes place in the active voice (which is unfortunately not always the most common voice) takes place between tenses and not between different pronouns. This is easy enough because all active verbs (normally) start with “m” for present tense, which is changed to “n” for past tense, and then changed to “h” for future tense.

For example:

Mihinana akondro aho. – I eat bananas.

Nihinana salady ratsy aho. – I ate bad lettuce.

Hihinana mofo gasy aho hariva. – I will eat sweat bread tonight.

To show possession is easy enough. There are endings for each pronoun that we add to the end of the word to indicate who it belongs to.

So the possessive endings go as follows:

Aho – ko

Ianao – nao

Izy – ny

Isika – ntsika

Izahay – nay

Ianareo – nareo

Izy ireo – ny

So, ny sakako, ny sakanao, ny sakany means my cat, your cat, and his/her cat.

The possessive is helpful with the passive voice because the verb’s subject gives its possessive ending. For example, tia is the root for “to like”. There are two ways to say you like something.

Tia manga aho. – I like mangos.

Tiako manga. – The mangos are liked by me.

Both are totally acceptable and common.

The Malagasy also like to add prefixes to things to make them into new words. For example, you can add “mp-“ to a verb a noun or “ma-/mi-“ to a noun to make it a verb. They can even be added on to one another. This is my favorite chain.

Mianatra – to learn

Mpianatra – the one who learns (student)

Mampianatra – to cause the learner to learn (to teach)

Mpampianatra – the one who causes the learner to learn (teacher)

It can get even crazier.

The last thing I will tell you is that however you think these words are pronounced, you’re wrong. You’re dead wrong. You’re not even close. Because the English and French fought over influence of the country forever, all the vowels make French sounds and all the consonants make English sounds, a settlement made by King Radama I. The letter combination ha doesn’t make a sound (most of the time). So Mahamasina, the name of my neighborhood, is pronounced ma-mà-sin-a, with the stress on the second syllable. Many times, if the word ends with -tra, -a, or -o, the syllable is weak, which means, to our unaccustomed ears, it’s not pronounced at all. So Lafo and mofo, expensive and bread, sound like laf and mof. To the Malagasy, they can hear the weak sound but don’t understand that we can’t.

But let me give you a little taste of what I’ve been able to learn up over the last three weeks since I started real lessons rather than trying to learn it from a book:

Salama, Nathaniel no anarako ary mpampianatra anglisy eto Madagasikara. Avy any Amerika aho fa mipetraka eto Tana satria mampianatra anglisy any amin’ny sekoly. Lycée JJR no anarany ny sekoly. Nandeha tany amin’ny onivarsite aho tany Maryland. Rehefa nandeha tany amin’ny onivarsite aho dia nianatra momba ny toe-karena sy franstay ary allemande. Manana klasy sivy abmin’ny folo sy mpianatra fitonjanta aho ka reraka kely isa-hariva fa mijery television kely na mamaky boky. Mandeha any amin’ny Jumbo aho rehefa mila miantsena fa mendeha any amin’ny tsena rehefa mila mividy legoima na voankazo satria mora any amin’y tsena noho any amin’ny Jumbo izy ireo. Mianatra Malagasy aho mba hiresaka amin’ny olona malagasy amin’ny malgasy. Tsy mahay miteny malagasy aho fa mbola mianatra.

Mila mahafantantra ianareo hoe: mivavaka ho anareo aho isa-maraina. Mampivavaka anareo ho ahy aho fotsiny. Midera i Andriamanitra.

Which all translates to:

“Hello, I’m Nathaniel and I am an English teacher here in Madagascar. I come from the United States, but I live here in Tana because I teach English in a school here. The school is called Lycée JJR. I went to university in Maryland. When I went to university, I studied economics, French, and German. I have 19 classes and 700 students so I’m a little tired every evening, but I watch a little television or read some books. I go to Jumbo when I need to shop but I go to the market when I need to buy vegetables and fruit because they are cheaper there. I am learning Malagasy in order to speak Malagasy with the Malagasy people. I don’t speak Malagasy very well, but I’m still learning.

You need to know that I pray for you every morning. I only ask you to pray for me. Praise be to God.”