Monday, April 23, 2018

The Creation of the Gods: Literary piece



At first, there was nothing but the Egg of Shamo in a void of nothingness. Nobody, not even Shamo himself, knew who created him or who put the Egg in the void. He did not know whether he created himself or not. He did not know how the Egg found its way where it was. But he did know that he was powerful and he could create from something as minor as a little ant to something as large as the paradise. Shamo knew he was the most powerful being in the whole of nothingness and that he was the new Creator.

Time passed. Shamo did not count whether it were days or months or decades. Time was not yet created. The God lay like that, in the confines of the Egg, maturing slowly and waiting for the moment to break out of its shell. The Eggshell glowed and glittered with all the aura of the rainbow – red, blue and gold and every other color. Shamo grew staring at the different brilliant colors, enjoying them, savoring them with his sight. He also examined the dark void around him through the translucent shell of his Egg. He knew right then and there that he had a lot of great tasks to do in the near future.

Analyzing the Code-Switching of Given Sample



Switching back and forth between languages is called code-switching. According to Mesthrie, code-switching is “switch[ing] back and forwards between languages, even during the same utterance”.
       
The given sample, which is a guidance leaflet for a clinic or a hospital, clearly shows a case of Intra-sentential code-switching, meaning that the switches between the matrix and the embedded languages take place in the same sentence. In this case, the matrix language or the frame language is Bangla because it follows the S-O-V sentence structure for Bangla and the embedded or guest language is English because it serves as a content word provider, for example, the switching takes place for noun phrases (serving patient; case sheet; ward master office; medi-specialist in-charge) and one verb (hand-over). This verb is treated as an auxiliary for Bangla, in this case.