уй vs үй

When a cow is a house or is it the other way around?

I rely heavily on AI and translator apps to function here in Kyrgyzstan. It has been a mixed bag of success and silliness. I would say that about 85% of the time they work well and I am able to communicate. The other 15% lead to awkwardness and blank stares. Sometimes you wind down the road towards comprehension with wind in your face, some good tunes and a smile. But then an object in the road forces you to swerve because it objects to your progress and you run headfirst into a language barrier. You feel stuck thinking, have I actually learned anything?

I received a text from my landlord a couple of weeks ago¹:

Джон салам эртен биз баралы дегенбиз тушто. Уйду карап Анан Бир бала менен барабыз ал видео фото тартат уйду.

If you put that into google translate this is what you see:

Hello John, we're going to go tomorrow at noon. We'll go look at the cow. Then we'll go with a boy who'll take a video and take photos of the cow.

Now my landlord knows that I work in agriculture, and I have seen my fair share of cows in Kyrgyzstan. But this message had me totally confused. Why is she letting me know that she’s going to take pictures of a cow. I have no idea what she does professionally, but I assume that bovine photography is a very niche field and not one that she is an active participate in. I saw the translation and immediately assumed that I was missing something.²

Before I got too wound up and to shield myself from a wound of embarrassment, I reached out to one of my Kyrgyz coworkers named Zarina for help. She speaks English very well and has helped me out with Kyrgyz translations in the past. She understood right away what the issue was, laughed a little, and helped me understand.

In the Kyrgyz language the word cow and house are very similar and most of the time you have to rely on context to know what the speaker is referring two. I didn’t know this, but there are actually two vowels that look like the letter ‘y’. Zarina drew them out for me so I could see.

I joked and pushed back a little - Are you sure those are two separate letters? One looks like you wrote in cursive, and the other doesn’t. I admitted defeat on this one quite quickly because when you learn the alphabet in Kyrgyz you indeed learn them both.³ It is also quite common here to frequently just use ‘у’ when typing out words on a phone because most people just use the Russian keyboard. Although both Russian and Kyrgyz use the Cyrillic alphabet there are additional Kyrgyz letters that don’t exist in Russian and they are only accessible via the Kyrgyz Keyboard. Most people are content to stick to just the Russian keyboard and forgo switching into Kyrgyz although their content may benefit from it. Context matters:

I learned that Cow and House are just one letter off.

Cow - уй

House - үй

Let’s go live with Rustam so you can live the difference for yourself:

Did you get it? It took me a minute to catch that minute difference.

The thing is we do the same thing in English but as native speakers we don’t notice it - like how we read read differently depending on the tense. At least in letters in the Kyrgyz alphabet always sound the same.⁴

Why do we do this in English?⁵

Learning a language is hard. Learning two is harder.⁶ To really be proficient in Kyrgyzstan you really need to be able to speak Kyrgyz and Russian. Russian is like the business language and Kyrgyz is the language of the locals outside of Bishkek. It presents a weird dichotomy. If you want to do business in Kyrgyzstan, you absolutely need to speak Russian, but if you want to be out in the fields working with farmers, Kyrgyz is essential.

In my experience most Kyrgyz people are proficient in both languages but have a preference. I know local Kyrgyz people and peers here who prefer Russian. They grew up going to Russian schools and speak Russian with their families. I’ve also met others who feel it is a matter of pride to speak Kyrgyz and although they can speak and understand Russian it is unpatriotic for two Kyrgyz people to speak to each other in Russian.

We are close to the close now. Yes, the cow vs. house experience was funny and we all got a kick out of it. But other experiences haven’t been so rosy and recently I walked out of a conversation where the language barrier was too great to overcome. I spent the majority of the day angry because of it. Lucky for me the latter experiences have been rare here.

I choose to focus on the cows. Maybe one day I’ll be able to hear the difference between уй and үй, but I still have a long way to go.

1. This is in Kyrgyz

2. Insert Ron Howard Narrator voice - “He was”

3. My two youngest children go to a Kyrgyz speaking preschool. The teacher sent us a video of our kids in class one day. In the background of this picture were all the letters of the alphabet taped up on the wall in an artsy manner. Sure enough - both у and ү were up there.

4. Letting my lead foot off the pedal to drive home my point, I’ve tried to lead you through some heteronyms. Yes, many of them were forced, but I wanted to present you this idea like a secretly present wrapped in a bow of English grammatical oddities.

5. If you need an explanation, I invite you to listen to what one of our forefathers has said on the subject.

6. I have to add a caveat here and admit that I haven’t invested as much time as I would have liked to in learning the languages here. Work has been busy and on a short-term contract I only have so many hours of functional brain power in a day. I’ve chosen to devout my time to work and family. Plus, I’m spoiled with a penta-lingual assistant. Rustam can speak - Russian, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkish, and English.