I often go walking in Tasik Sarubing and Bukit Markucing with my colleagues. Yesterday, I was walking there with one colleague. A local chap had seen three of us walking there earlier in the week, and he asked:
Where's your plane?
This left me bemused. Fortunately, my colleague understood it correctly as:
Where's your friend?
and gave a suitable reply.
I felt really stupid, as I should have been able to understand it in context. /f/ is often pronounced as [p] locally, as Malay does not have /f/, except in a few borrowed words such as faham ('understand') and fail ('file'). (see here)
I guess I'm not very good at accommodating to local patterns of pronunciation, even though I've been in Brunei for over six years now.
