More from Bukit Mentiri

Today I showed the "Baru ya macam inda nggalih kita atu" picture from my 25 January blog (here) to my Year 4 students at UBD, and though they are fluent in Brunei Malay, none of them could make any sense of it -- until someone worked it out and read it with the right intonation. Then the others said, "Oh, I get it now!" This neatly underlines the fact that Brunei Malay is a spoken language, and a written representation of it does not seem to work too well.

One more thing of linguistic interest from the Bukit Mentiri forest walk: someone from the Forestry Department has labelled lots of the trees in different local languages. For example, the following tree has been named in Brunei Malay, Tutong, Kedayan, Dusun, and Iban:

I was puzzled by the following sign, which also has 'KM'. So I asked one of the villagers (many of whom are clearly putting lots of effort into maintaining the trail magnificently), and he told me that 'KM' refers to 'Kampung Mentiri' or maybe 'Kadayan Mentiri' -- he wasn't sure which, though maybe there's no difference, as most of the villagers are Kadayan.

It is splendid to see this effort being spent on making a record of words from the heritage languages of Brunei, as some (such as Belait) are almost extinct and others (such as Tutong) are under severe threat of disappearing.