HOWMANIETH SON/DAUGHTER ARE YOU TO YOUR MOTHER/FATHER?
I am posing this question to all the native teachers of English-the British, the American, the Canadian, the West Indian, the Australian. You may feel that I am mad. Some of you may curse me. A few of you think you don’t need to answer. Some may take pity on my poor grammar .The majority of you may go to the extent of calling me a cultureless brute! Sorry! I am neither mad nor idiotic. I can understand your feelings. I have respect for your culture too. Then why did I ask you the question? Can you guess?
Some of you might have guessed. The rest of you are thinking it over! Infact, I would like to narrate the problem I have faced during my teaching profession. One of the participants asked me to frame questions for the following statements
1 I am the third son to my father.
2 Rajiv Gandhi is the Tenth Prime Minister of India.
I was at a loss. I could not frame the questions properly. For the first time I felt the limitations of English. Later I went to C.I.E.F.L for my contact program .I posed the same question to a professor there He said that it was very difficult to frame such questions without an interrogative adverb like howmanieth. .However, he said that we could frame questions like this, for the time being. 1 What is your rank/number among your brothers.2 What is the rank of Rajiv Gandhi among the prime Ministers of India or What is Rajiv Gandhi’s rank/number as the Prime Minister of India? He agreed that the constructions were rather clumsy and Awkward. But he could not help it. The story did not end there.
Four native speakers from London came to my school during their teaching project under the collaboration of VESL, a voluntary organization based in England. I asked them the same kind of questions. Their immediate response was “we had never been asked such questions .When I insisted on answering my questions, they said the question could be like this. Which number daughter are you to your father? But they were not sure of their question .By the by what would be your response if you were teaching in India and you encountered yourself the same problem? I am asking you again. Howmanieth son/daughter are you to your mother/father?
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Comments
Dear Teaching English team, I have waited long that some reader would respond to my genuine question but in vain. At last you have broken the silence by voting the blog with an awesome grade. I express my gratitude to your team for your gracious gesture. I hope the blog will be voted and graded further
yours sincerely,
JVL NARASIMHA RAO
Hi again!
I totally understand your question. I have British ancestry and I grew up in an Anglo-Argentine family and every time I had a question about something which my students asked and I hesitated about, they told me "I don't know really" "take it easy, we don't know that answer either".
I go along with you. It's hard to be a non-native, to study loads of English to be an effective teacher and yet not to have 100% of the answers. I've learned to say "It's a good question. I'm going to find out later because I'm not sure"
I guess the C.I.E.F.L Professor came out with a good way to frame those questions. I'd have framed them in exactly the same way.
Thank you for your blogs!
Georgina
www.teachingenglish.org.uk/blogs/georginahudson
My dear Georgina,
I am really delighted to get a response from an outstanding native English writer of your calibre and professional expertise. It is really surprising that no native English teacher or speaker has responded to my blog for so long. It is you who have responded to my biography, It is you who have responded to my blog which has a lot of linguistic importance and potential.
I thank you very much for your interst in my blogs.I hope you will read all of them and add your invaluable comments to them
yours lovingly,
JVL Narasimha Rao
Andrha Pradesh
India