Wedding Gift

In Brunei, it is the custom for wedding guests to receive a gift, to act as a memento of the happy occasion. Usually, this is a bowl or a cup or something like that, something pretty you can put on the shelf as a souvenir.

In the reception I went to last Sunday (after the wedding I mentioned here), this is what we found when we opened our stylish little gold-coloured boxes:Yup, it's a packet of rice!

Now, I suspect that a few of the guests will have felt a bit disappointed to find a packet of rice rather than the pretty little bowl or cup that they were expecting. But I was really touched. Not only is it something practical, as I can eat it rather than letting it add to the jumble of things I don't need cluttering up the house; but I also love the originality of someone doing what they want to do rather than blindly adhering to the expectations of society.

Splendid, Badriyah! That was a lovely gift.

psikologi

Obviously, the Malay word psikologi is a borrowing from the English word psychology. But how should it be pronounced?

Colleagues at UBD have confirmed that there are three variables: whether there is an initial /p/ or not; whether the vowel in the first syllable is /ai/ (following the English) or /i/ (following the spelling); and whether the final consonant is /dʒ/ (as in the English) or /g/ (as suggested by the spelling).

The first of these surprised me. I assumed that the initial would be just /s/, as /ps/ would never be possible in at the start of a word in Malay (or, indeed, in English). But apparently, /pisikologi/ is possible, with an inserted vowel between the /p/ and the /s/.

In the recording accompanying my Malay textbook, the speaker says /saikologi/, which seems a bit unexpected as it is using the English vowel for the first syllable but following the spelling for the final consonant. I don't know how common this kind of mixture is.

Wedding

I always find it rather bizarre to open the newspaper and see photos of people I know. But I guess that is what happens in such a small country.

This picture, reporting on the wedding of my UBD colleague, Siti Badriyah, is from the front page of Media Permata:I hope she and her husband have a wonderful life together.

cecair

I have previously discussed the difficulties of using a Malay dictionary (e.g. here). This basically involves removing the prefixes so that you can identify the root of the word, for that is where the word is generally listed. This is not always straightforward, especially for a learner of Malay, as the root of menyambut ('welcome') is sambut, while that of menawar ('make an offer') is tawar.

I still sometimes get caught out. For example, I wanted to look up cecair ('liquid'). It turns out that it is listed under cair ('liquid').

The problem with this is that ce is not a standard prefix (like the very common prefixes ber, ke or meN). Eventually, I discovered that reduplication is regarded as a standard morphological process, which is why ce can be added on to the front of the root cair. Other examples given by Malay Grammar Made Easy (Liaw Yock Fang, Times, 1999, p. 362) include:

• tetamu ('guest'): root = tamu ('guest')
• lelangit ('palate'): root = langit ('sky')
• lelaki ('man'): root = laki ('husband')
• jejari ('radius'): root = jari ('finger')
• rerambut ('capillary'): root = rambut ('hair')

The problem here is that none of these other words, tetamu, lelangit, lelaki, jejari, or rerambut, are shown in the dictionary under their given roots. They are all simply listed as full entries. Only cecair is listed under the root. No wonder it is so hard to find words like this. Trying to learn Malay really can be frustrating.

Katakijau

There is an organisation in Brunei called Katakijau that seems to be engaged in various environmental activities.

When I first heard it mentioned on the radio, and then I saw the name discussed in the newspaper, I tried to work out what it means, assuming it was kata ('word') + kijau (??). But then I could not work out what kijau might mean.

Even when I saw their logo on the Internet, it didn't twig that it was katak ('frog') + (h)ijau ('green') until a colleague explained it to me.

It was the missing 'h' that caught me out. But an absent 'h' at the start of a word is fairly common in Brunei Malay. For example, the following all have an initial 'h' in Standard Malay but none in Brunei Malay:

• (h)ari ('day')
• (h)itam ('black')
• (h)ujan ('rain')

I should also have thought of orangutan, which is orang ('man') + (h)utan ('forest'), which similarly has a missing 'h' at the start of the second morpheme.

Guangxi University

I spent five days last week as a guest at Guangxi University in Nanning, southern China. The campus is in many ways beautiful, with lots of trees and flowers; but I found it rather grey, perhaps because of the overcast weather. Maybe if I had gone there at a different time of the year, I would have appreciated it more.One of the things that struck me most was the lack of resources. Here is a picture of the libary (taken from their website). It is, indeed, a grand building. But inside? I couldn't find too many modern books.

In fact, one of the questions I was constantly asked was: how do we get published? And my answer was that you must have access to modern books. The people there are really keen to get involved in work on World Englishes, but none of them had even heard of writers such as Jennifer Jenkins, Andy Kirkpatrick or Edgar Schneider, much less read any of their materials. How can you expect to publish papers if you have not read recent books?

It is stunning to see so many hard-working, bright research students and academics beavering away at various research projects but having no access to the materials they need. And I see no prospect of them publishing in serious journals unless they get access to those materials.

Chinese Flag

I previously mentioned the absence of a Chinese flag in my set of flags on the right (here). But now look: we have the flag of the People's Republic of China, currently with five visitors! Yippee! So people from China can finally read my blog. Splendid!

Well, no, actually. This past week, I was in Nanning, the capital of the Guangxi Autonomous Region in south China. And it is not possible to access my blog from Nanning. Moreover, it seems that there are huge gaps in what people in China can access.

Now, I have no delusions into believing that my blog is essential reading for students of linguistics in China. But what about other materials? What about John Wells's Phonetic Blog (here), which has some valuable discussions about phonetics? Not available. What about NGram, the excellent utility from Google that lets you look at the way the usage of words has changed over the past 200 years (here)? Not available.

My heart goes out to the thousands, or maybe it is millions, of students and academics in China who are trying so desperately to participate in research, but don't have access to the resources they need.

More about that in a subsequent blog.

What I would love to know is this: those five visitors from China, how did you manage to access the site when others are not able to? I would love to understand the mechanics of the Web better.

29 New Books

From page A5 of The Brunei Times of 27 February, 2011, reporting on a speech by the Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports:

The minister said that Brunei's institutions of higher education are one of the key aspects for Brunei's expansion of the book publishing industry.

As much as 29 local book titles have been launched in various categories include one comic book.

Er .... 29 book titles? As a source of pride? That doesn't sound like very many to me.

But maybe something is wrong here. The English is problematic (much rather than many; include rather than including); so perhaps the journalist is not expressing herself too clearly.

Congkak

Congkak is a game played by two people. You sit opposite your oponent and take it in turns to move pieces around the wooden containers. This is an extract from a leaflet that attempts to explain the rules. The English is perhaps the worst piece of translation I have come across:In addition to being the name of the game, congkak also means 'supercilious'. The two words are unrelated; in linguistics, we say they are homonyms, as they are both written and pronounced in the same way, though there is actually no connection between them. (Just like bark in English: it can be the outside of a tree or the sound of a dog, but there is no link between these two words.)

The translator here has chosen the wrong meaning for congkak, apparently without any awarenss of what is being written. It looks like every word has been looked up in a dictionary without any idea of context.

And then, in the second line kedua-dua means 'the two of them'. But kedua on its own means 'second', and this is the translation chosen. Bizarre!

(My thanks to Ish for giving me this leaflet, and also to Adrian Clynes for helping to decipher it.)

Editing Wikipedia

As part of my fourth year course on Electronic Communication, we look at Wikipedia, specifically at how we might improve some of the entries. And the pages on Brunei are a good starting point, as there are rather a lot of problems.

For example, look at the 'Language' section in the main entry on Brunei (here). It starts off:

The official language of the nation is Brunei Melayu

Well, that is simply not true. In fact, the official language of the nation is Bahasa Melayu (Standard Malay). Even the link offered to support the assertion (here) starts off:

THE official language of Brunei Darussalam is Bahasa Melayu

So, I got one of my students to correct it. But then, guess what? The change was undone. I can't be bothered to work out exactly who did it, but from the Revision History it looks like it might have been someone by the name of 'Gotipe'.

Now, the most widely spoken language is indeed Brunei Malay. Although some people might wish it were the official language, it is not. So why insist on putting incorrect information into Wikipedia when you know it is wrong? I don't understand that. But I can just try to do my best to improve things a bit, to improve the accuracy of the entries a little, and if it doesn't work out, then so be it.

Actually, there are worse problems on the Brunei page. Have a look at the section on geography (here). It claims that the mean maximum temperature for February is 24.8 degrees Celsius. That is patently absurd, as anybody who has ever been here knows. The temperature reaches at least 30 degrees almost every single day. But I don't have the correct figures, so I'll leave that part alone.

It is rather unfortunate how bad this page on Brunei is, and it gives us a warning not to rely too much on Wikipedia. For basic information, Wikipedia is maybe OK. But don't rely on it. Ever!

Plastic Bag

On Monday evening, I was flying back from Singapore on an RBA flight, and as we approached Brunei, I heard the announcement "We will shortly be collecting the handsets. Please place them in the plastic bag." What I found interesting was that the main stress in the second sentence was on plastic rather than on bag (which is where I would have put it).

The rule for stress placement in noun phrases such as plastic bag is this: if it is a compound noun (N + N), such as traffic lights or police car, then the stress falls on the first item; but if it is Adj + Noun, such as tall man or interesting film, then the main stress falls on the second item. In this case, plastic is an adjective, so the stress should fall on bag rather than plastic.

Well, fine. Except there are rather a lot of exceptions. For example, Oxford Street is stressed on Oxford, but Oxford Road is stressed on Road; and chocolate cake is stressed on chocolate while choocolate biscuit is stressed on biscuit. And there seems to be no easy explanation for these patterns.

Perhaps it's not really surprising if the RBA announcer didn't follow the native stress patterns exactly!

Denizen

Last week, I spent two days in the UBD Belalong Research Centre, a magical place nestling on a river in the depths of the forest in Temburong:The trip was organised by my UBD colleague, Ulmar Grafe. He told me something I found interesting about his language usage: when he writes academic articles, he always likes to use one word, as a sort of fingerprint. The word is denizens (meaning 'inhabitants').

When he told me this, I thought that the word basically only occurs in the phrase 'denizens of the forest', so it constitutes a fixed phrase, just like cosh only occurs in the phrase 'under the cosh', and whet rarely occurs outside of 'whet your appetite'. But I just did a search in the COCA corpus, where I found 421 instances of denizens, and only three of them are collocated with forest. So it seems that the word has a wider usage than I thought. Instances include:

Denizens of the city came running
the indulgent, everhopeful denizens of Wrigley Field
the denizens of my city's different neighborhoods
the mordant denizens of Wonderland still basking in peculiarity
Land's End's denizens indeed excited alarm
He imagined the denizens of that garden cheering him

I wonder whether I have any word that I tend to use regularly in my academic articles, as a fingerprint of my authorship. I can't think of any at the moment, but I suspect I do.

Wanita

This is the headline from the front page of the Media Permata of 5 February:It says "Women today can play an important role for the country", and it is summarising a recent speech by the Queen.

It is rather surprising that this could be the topic of a speech. In most places, the contribution of women towards the country is assumed, so there would be no point in talking about it in a speech. But the fact that it is worth discussing and moreover making into the headline on the front page of the national newspaper is a reflection of the conservative nature of Brunei society.

Tiger Lim

I was just reading some of the entries in the blog by Tiger Lim (here). For example:

You know lah back to early 80's where got many entertainment one... the best one is watching movie loh.

and

Anak Bungsu got one thing not good is they always been forgotten easily sometime by the family. In the movie "Home Alone" also same like this...

These extracts raise some interesting linguistic questions:

• Clearly, this use of informal, non-standard English is deliberate. I wonder how natural it is. And is this style of speech becoming formalised among a segment of the population?
• If it is becoming established, does it have a grammar that could be described?
• To what extent is this style of language different from similar usage that might be found in Singapore? Of course, Anak Bungsu ('youngest child') is Malay. Would a Chinese Singaporean use an expression like that? Or does its use reflect the fact that he is Bruneian?
• To what extent is this style of language different among Chinese and Malay Bruneians? My impression is that the pragmatic particles lah and lor are rather more common among Chinese, but I am not certain. Also, what about the use of one in 'many entertainment one' ― is this also used by Malays?

I find playful, innovative language like this quite refreshing. Of course, it would be a problem if it cropped up in a formal setting; but then there should always be a range of styles of usage, and a blog is one medium where many people choose an informal style such as this.

Multilingual Warning Sign

This is the sign on the outside fence of the satellite relay station at the top of the hill at the start of the Tasek Lama to Markucing forest trail in BSB.The warning is given in three different languages (Malay, Chinese, and English) using three different scripts (Roman, Jawi, and Chinese). The first two messages are both in Malay, using the two different scripts, Roman and Jawi.

In Brunei, while it is common to see signs in Malay (using both Roman and Jawi scripts) and also in English, it is less common to see Chinese on official signs. I'm not sure why it is regarded as important, in this case, to warn Chinese people from entering this particular facility, though it is certainly true that many of the people who exercise by walking up and down the hill are Chinese.

Writing Cantonese

It is often claimed that because the Chinese script is not phonetic, it allows the different Chinese languages (or 'dialects') to be written with a common script.

While this is partially true, it is not entirely correct, for it overlooks grammar. While it is certainly possible to take a newspaper written in Mandarin and read it out using Cantonese or Taiwanese pronunciation, the grammar is still Mandarin grammar, not Cantonese or Taiwanese.

Regional varieties of Chinese also have their own idiosyncratic lexicon, and sometimes it is not easy to represent these words using the standard characters. I have mentioned innovative characters for the Taiwanese equivalent of 的 (here) and also the use of 'A' in Taiwan to represent another Taiwanese morpheme (here).

In Macao, I saw this sign, where the Chinese is literally "not allow park car". The third character 泊 is a local innovation, as the standard Chinese for 'park car' is 停車 rather than 泊車. The latter is a borrowing from English, as 泊 is pronounced [pak] in Cantonese. But it neatly illustrates that the use of characters in Hong Kong and Macao may not be exactly the same as in Beijing.

'A' in Taiwan

In recent posts, I have commented on innovative linguistic usage in Taiwan, both borrowing from English such as 霸凌 from bullying (here), and the occasional invention of new characters (here), though this last category is not so frequent because of the difficulty of printing the invented characters.

One other kind innovative language that is commonly found in Taiwan is the use of Roman letters, something that Victor Mair has commented on in Language Log (here). A Roman letter that is often used in this way is A, which means something like 'to obtain something illegally, to embezzle', for example in the phrase 'A 來的 錢' ('money that is obtained through embezzlement').

In fact, this use of A has become so common that I even saw it in the official booklet signed by the mayor of Taipei and given to my wife to welcome her as a citizen of Taipei City:This is in the section on sport and recreation, and it says: "Walking is not only for strengthening the body but it can also help you get health", where I have glossed A as 'help you get'. Note here that the use of A has been extended to include a positive meaning, and no doubt the usage is intended to be light-hearted, as is appropriate for discussion of sport.

Heavy Subjects

It is sometimes interesting to consider what is an error and what is a feature of a local variety of English.

I saw this sign at a scenic site near Yangmingshan, just north of Taipei. As far as I can see, the translation is pretty good. I would say that there are no errors there.

However, in some ways it does not really read quite right. Look at the subject of the sentence that forms the final paragraph. It consists of 32 words, starting with 'The thickness ...' and ending with '... and altitude'. A heavy subject like this is unusual in English, where we generally try to move long things to the end of the sentence. (We sometimes say that English is an 'end-weight' language.)

If I were to translate this sentence, I would probably move things around a bit, writing something like 'The beauty of this mountain range is created by the thickness ....'. But maybe I would be over-translating, and thereby removing some of the flavour of the original. Perhaps the translation shown on this sign is actually better, as it respects the style of the original more accurately. But then there is never a perfect translation; there are just a range of choices you can make.

I earlier mentioned the book on Chinese English by Xu Zhichang (here). He investigates features of Chinese English without talking about errors; and the structure of noun phrases is something he discusses. I think he is right to claim that noun phrases, particularly subjects, can be very long in Chinese English. And he is equally right to say that this does not constitute an error, just a feature of Chinese English.

New Maps

In the past month, some new maps have been installed along the Tasek Lama to Markucing forest trail in Brunei. Here's a picture of the one near the BSB start of the trail:If you look carefully at the details, there is a bit of a problem: the legend at the bottom shows how long 1 km is; but the map suggests that the part of the trail between Peak 9 (Bukit Laur) and Peak 10 (Bukit Markucing) is 1.3 km long.

It's not too easy to see here, so I'll expand the two relevant parts of the map, enlarging each by the same amount to keep their relative size constant. Here is the section of the trail, which the map suggests is 1.3 km long:And here is the legend showing how long 1 km is:This cannot be correct. If the map is accurate, that trail must be at least 2 km long. Either the scale of the map is wrong, or some of the distances shown on the map are incorrect.

Never mind, they are splendid maps and should be very helpful for people following the trails, even if the distances are maybe not quite right.

Royal Birth

On 2 January, Princess Sarah, the wife of the Crown Prince of Brunei, gave birth to a daughter. The headline on page 1 of the Media Permata of 3 January announcing this happy event was this:'YTM' stands for Yang Teramat Mulia ('the most honourable'); and selamat meluaran seorang Puteri means 'safely gave birth to a princess'.

If an ordinary person gives birth, it is melahirkan anak. But for members of the Royal Family, an entirely different vocabulary is used, in order to show proper respect to the Sultan and his family. This language is called Bahasa Dalam ('Palace Language', literally 'inside language'). In this case, the verb is meluaran rather than melahirkan. The root of the word is luar ('outside'), and the -an suffix is a bit unexpected, as -kan is a more usual suffix for transitive verbs. But maybe it is true that much of Bahasa Dalam does not follow the usual rules for Malay morphology.