#if you were wondering what asuryampasya means‚ it's 'someone who never sees the sun' (because I'm always cooped up in my room types)

[an-asuryampasya]

[more armchair language-stuff rambling (been a while!), admittedly mostly written for an audience of me, under a cut since I remember my manners]

FASCINATING.

(well, to me anyway)

So idk what the official linguistics term for this is, but one pretty significant difference between English and the other two languages I speak is how words get combined.

Okay so first off, insert here standard disclaimer regarding confirmation bias. With that out of the way: When I speak English, I mostly try to keep each word of the sentence distinct as I speak it (and fail, but that's because /I/ personally am a terrible speaker. Anyway, I digress). The exceptions are contractions, but again, melding those words together is only accepted for certain established/common contractions like 'isn't' or 'ain't'. I can't expect to get away with saying/writing "mashtagether" or something instead of "mash together". But the thing is, in Telugu I sort of can.

I mean there's this whole section of grammar devoted to rules on mashing words together based on what sounds they start or end with (and they're pretty intuitive for most part, tbh) rather than a list of words like in English (i.e., is+not=isn't, etc.), and they apply to any set of words with those starting/ending sounds. These combined words are accepted in both, written and spoken Telugu too. (Even my url is a sandhi! It's a+surya+pasya=asuryampasya, if I'm not wrong. Sidenote: "if I'm not wrong is such a useless phrase for a reader. 'I'm saying this but I could be wrong, haha! So you can take away nothing from what I just said, except maybe that I'm annoying'. anyway, still using it though.) (Also, similar rules are also present in multiple Indian languages. Though I'm talking only about Telugu because that's what I have at least a vague idea about.) (Also also, yes I am incapable of not including a minimum of 68 asides in parentheses.) (Oh, also, if you're wondering, it's still quite easy to understand words even when joined together. "Mashtagether" makes no sense and is possibly hard to separate into the constituent words in English, but it's not so hard in Telugu. Idk why - the rules? the intuitiveness? not sure. Maybe just good ol' phonetic languages ftw? idk, anyway, back to the point.)

Anyway, I swear I'm going somewhere with this.

[....at this point I took a break to grab a snack and forgot the point I was going to make ._. ]

ehh ditch, too sleepy to care. moving on!

BUT. Aside from sandhis, there's another, informal form of mashing together of words that occur I think. At least, I think they're not covered by sandhis since I don't use them in written Telugu, but I could be mistaken. Or perhaps they're more accurately corruptions?

Anyway, the point is, these are more fascinating to me and I'd love to talk about them more, but right now I want to talk about one specific type of this corruption (as I'm going to call it). It's the first time I've noticed it be repeated in multiple words (with similar sounds, of course - which makes me wonder if I'm misidentifying it as a corruption). First, there's 'mom's brother'. In Telugu that would be your 'mamayya'. Except none of my cousins call my dad their 'mamayya', and instead say 'moyya'. (Well, more accurately they say Bobmoy since that's what 'Babu mamayya' eventually devolved into. It's also fun to say. See also: the derivative used by their kids: 'Babu tata' becoming Bobtat.) Or father in law, which in my part of the world is 'mamayyagaru'. But my mum was gently nudged to not pronounce it that way - and instead 'moyyagaru' is preferred. Now consider the completely unrelated word, raw mango! 'kaya' = unripe fruit, 'mamidi' identifies mango. So a raw mango is technically 'mamidikaya', but when spoken it's often called 'modkaya/maudkaya'.

For some reason, mama/mami words get converted into mod's.

They're unrelated words that underwent similar changes. Though I suppose that makes sense - Telugu is a phonetic language, and so it should be natural that these changes are based on the phonemes and stuff? (also I am aware that phonetic language isn't a techical term but bleh.)

okie that exhausts what I remember wanting to say and I can't be bothered to figure out a good ending or even edit, so uh.

this concludes this post?

Oh wait, I know!

fin.