One important issue for Malay morphology is identifying the root of a word; and I ask my students what the root of penyelia ('supervisor') is.
The answer is: selia. And you have to know this if you want to find the word in a dictionary. The problem here is that selia does not exist as an independent morpheme, so we might describe it as a bound root. Here is the entry in my Collins dictionary:
What is rather surprising is that most of my first-year students do not know this, and they look bemused when I tell them that selia is the root. This indicates that they would not be able to use a Malay dictionary to look up the meaning of a word such as this.I find this very strange. I always have an English dictionary available, and I regularly check the meaning or pronunciation of English words. But speakers of Malay in Brunei do not seem to do this for their own language.
