Class 42 — health and emergency, in Malayalam script. This is the vocabulary drill: four blocks, every word written properly in script so that what you hear is the real sound. Repeat every item aloud — and if you cannot speak, mouth it with your tongue moving. പനി (pani) — fever. Start here, because this is the word you will hear more than any other health word in Kerala. In this climate fever is the default illness, and പനി covers a wide band of feverish unwellness rather than a precise temperature reading. ജലദോഷം (jaladosham) — a common cold, and this one is worth a moment. Break it apart: ജലം is water, ദോഷം is a fault, a defect, a harmful influence. Water-trouble. Malayalam is telling you the old theory of the illness inside the word — that a cold comes from cold and wet. And English does exactly the same thing without noticing. We say catch a cold, as though the temperature itself were the agent. French speakers attraper un rhume. Hindi calls it सर्दी, which simply means coldness. Chinese names it 感冒, a character pair meaning to be affected by wind. Four unrelated languages, all encoding the same pre-modern theory, all still in daily use. Nobody believes it any more, and everybody still says it. THE PATTERN THAT GIVES YOU A DOZEN WORDS FREE: വേദന (vedana) means pain, and Malayalam simply glues it onto the body part. തല (thala) head → തലവേദന (thalavedana) headache വയറ് (vayaru) stomach → വയറുവേദന (vayaruvedana) stomach ache പല്ല് (pallu) tooth → പല്ലുവേദന (palluvedana) toothache Also in the blocks: ചുമ (chuma) cough, and the vocabulary of the clinic, the pharmacy and the emergency. Class 73 gives the explanation — how Malayalam frames pain, how Ayurvedic vocabulary works, what to expect in a clinic. Today we simply build the words into your mouth. Quizzes below. Dr. Reshmi R Nair — SpeakMalayalam.