The New Dominion

Survival Uyghur

From The New Dominion

Lesson Three: Buying Small Items

Introduction

Salam! and welcome to “Survival Uyghur”, The New Dominion’s series on speaking practical Uyghur. Last week, we learned a pair of common greetings. Today, we will work some more with numbers, get you some new vocabulary, and introduce one more verb, as well as (gasp!) a suffix.

Picking up something small to eat – bread, cookies, cake, fruit – is pretty straightforward. You point, you say “I’ll take three of these,” and you hand the seller some cash. Let’s not think about bargaining, just yet. We’ll assume, for this lesson, that you’re going into a store (like Arman) with set prices. Baked goods are a pleasure of life in Xinjiang. Along the streets, you will regularly find little hole-in-the-wall bakeries, their windows stacked up with cookies, little pastries, and, if you’re early enough, buttery layer cake.

Note: This lesson is a little complex! If you don’t get the grammar at first, don’t sweat it. You can still use the phrases in their proper context, and we’ll return to this topic later on. There’s also an easy shortcut at the end of the lesson!

Grammar

You have a new verb: al- “to take”. Remember yäymän “I eat” from Lesson One? This verb works the same way: alimän “I take”, alisiz “you take”. You use this when you’re buying something, rather than when you’re sitting down and eating it. “I’ll take one!” Remember, verbs come at the end of the sentence!

You can use this verb in two ways:

(Number) (Thing) alimän! “I’ll take (Number) (Thing)!”

Ex. “Bir nan alimän!” “I’ll take one bread!”

(Thing)-din (Number) (Counter) alimän! “I’ll take (Number) of (Thing)!”

Ex. “Nandin bir tal alimän!” “I’ll take one piece of the bread!”

Ex. “Torttin bir kilo alimän!” “I’ll take a kilo of the cake!”

How does this work? Here’s your first noun suffix. -din/-tin is what we call the Ablative Suffix. It means that what comes next is moving away from or out of the word to which it is attached. We know that nan is “bread”, and we’ve learned that bir is the number “one”. So, nandin bir is “out of the bread, one”.[1]

We can use the same form to understand a second item you definitely want to try, Uyghur-style cake. Cake is tort. Because tort ends in a “t”, the suffix takes the form -tin: torttin bir. This isn’t going to work, though, unless you want a whole sheet cake, so you’re going to have to specify: one what of cake? In this case, one kilogram, or kilo. (Let’s pretend, for now, that a kilogram of cake is a reasonable purchase.)

In the mean time, we should return to the nan “bread” example. It doesn’t seem entirely necessary, but it is good to specify that you want a “piece” of bread, a single “item” of bread. You call this a tal: bir tal.

Both of these phrases can be turned around: Bir tal nan, bir kilo tort. Bir tal nan, however, is uncommon in this context.

Dialogue: I’ll take one of those.

Let’s see these in action.

Your mission for today: find somewhere on the street where they’re selling fresh-baked nan. Nan is Uyghur flatbread, the most common variety of which is a bit like a giant, crusty cracker, very suitable for making an improvised pizza.

Approach the seller of nan. A greeting of “Ässalam äläykum!” may be in order. (Lesson Two (A)!) Point to a fresh-looking piece of bread and say:

You: Bir nan alimän. OR Nandin bir tal alimän.

It’s just like Bir polo yäymän! in Lesson One, but you’ve switched in bread and taking for polo and eating.

This will probably cost two RMB, referred to in Uyghur as koy, from the Chinese kuai.

Nan seller: Ikki koy. “Two RMB.”

The same goes for tort “cake”. You could just walk up to the counter and say:

You: Torttin bir kilo alimän. OR Bir kilo tort alimän.

Cake seller: On koy. “Ten RMB.”

However, no one buys a kilogram of cake. It’s a lot of cake. A more reasonable amount would be a yerim “half” kilogram: yerim kilo:

You: Torttin yerim kilo alimän. OR Yerim kilo tort alimän.

Cake seller: Bäsh koy. “Five RMB.”

Vocabulary and Pronunciation

You’ve noticed that I slipped in some numbers here: ikki, bäsh, on – 2, 5, 10.

on “10″ doesn’t sound like the English “on”. Instead, the vowel “o” sounds like English “oh!”

The “ä” in bäsh “5″ sounds somewhere between the one in English “bash” and “mesh”.

ikki doesn’t sound like it’s written. Try saying something like “‘ish-ke”, where a short, popping “ish” is followed by a “keh”. (If you say “ikki”, though, you will probably be understood.)

yerim “half” sounds like “yeh, rim”. Remember, Uyghur “i” is short, like “ih”, not “ee” or “ay”.

A note on pronouncing tort: in Uyghur, an “r” at the end of a word or before another consonant is usually not pronounced, as in many varieties of American and British English. tort comes out as tot, with a longer “oh” sound.

Extending the Dialogue

Now that you have a basic sentence pattern to work with, you can get all kinds of things.

Try picking up these individual items, switching them in for nan: Bir/ikki ___ alimän. OR ___-din bir/ikki tal alimän.

doppa “Uyghur skullcap” tamaka “cigarette”

Or these items, sold in bulk: Bir/ikki/yerim kilo ___ alimän. OR ___-din bir/ikki/yerim kilo alimän.

gürüch “rice” un “flour” gösh “meat”

Or these, which are both!

pichina-pränik “cookie” marozhna “ice cream” alma “apple”

The easiest thing you can do, however, is to point to something and say:

You: Mawuningdin bir tal/kilo alimän.

This is literally “I’ll have one of these.” Pronounce mawuning “these” as máaning: Máaningdin bir tal/kilo alimän.

For Advanced Learners

You: Bäsh botelka suw alimän. “I’ll take five bottles of water.”

Also try:

You: Yerim täxsä polo alimän.

Server: Yerim täxsimu?

You: Hä’ä, yerim täxsä.

Server: Töt koy.

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[1] Language nerds may think of this as the partitive case. I am not even going to touch that, right now.