The Language of the Modhupur Mandi (Garo), Volume 2
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4.218 Compass Directions
pp. 111In the two years that I lived in the Garo Hills, I knew of, but never managed to learn, the terms for the four points of the compass. The hill Garos seemed to have a keen sense of direction. They could point, apparently accurately, to distant villages, but my failure to learn their compass terms could only have been due to the rarity with which the people I knew used them. When, many years later, I began to live among Mandis in Bangladesh I learned their terms for the compass points almost immediately because they were used constantly. Their terms, however, were borrowed from Bengali. The native Garo terms that I had been told about earlier in the Garo Hills were known to some Mandis in Bangladesh but they were as rarely used there as they had been in the hills. The difference between the two areas must be due to the difference in their topography. Bangladeshi Mandis live in flat country with few distinctive topographical landmarks. They need the compass directions to keep themselves oriented. Bangladeshi Mandis have even borrowed the Bengali practice of orienting their houses, more or less, to the compass. Houses in the Garo Hills have to be built to conform to the slope of the land, and they can face in any direction at all.
I was always puzzled by sal-gro 'north' and sal-gip-eng 'south'. gro and gip-eng mean, respectively 'length' and 'breadth', but I could not understand what these have to do with 'north' and 'south'. Mijenma, a senior lady from the village of Gaira in Bangladesh, offered what strikes me as a plausible explanation. Sal-gro 'north' describes the relatively long path that the sun takes through the sky in the summer when the sun is in the north. Sal-gip-eng 'south' describes the shorter path that it takes during the winter.
Page 112dok-kiin n. south. <B
pos-chiim, pot-chiim n. west. <B
pup, pur-bo n. east. <B
ut-tor n. north. <B
sal-a-ram n. east, (mainly A˙ chik).
sal-gip-eng, sal-gip-eng-pang n. south, the southern (shorter) path of the winter sun, (mainly A˙ chik).
sal-gro n. north; the northern (longer) summer path of the sun, (mainly A˙ chik).
sal-i-ram n. west, (mainly A˙ chik).
