05 February 2016

Estet Industrial

This is a picture taken by James McLellan in Limbang, which he discussed in his recent FASS seminar. (For more details, see here.)

The second line is, of course, in Chinese. But what language is the first line in?

Both the words are English, but the spelling of the first word estet ('estate') is in Malay, and the word order, with the adjective occurring after the noun it modifies, is clearly Malay.

So, what language is it in? There seems to be no easy answer to this question.