Chilean

I was just watching Chile against Australia in the World Cup, and the commentator (who seemed to be from Britain) constantly referred to the Chilean team as /tʃɪˈleɪən/. I have never heard that before, and for me it would be /ˈtʃɪlɪən/.

I then checked the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd edn), and indeed /ˈtʃɪlɪən/ is the only possibility listed for British pronunciation. However, for American pronunciation, /tʃɪˈliːən/ is given as the most common, followed by /tʃɪˈleɪən/, so the commentator was using the second pronunciation found in the USA.

I wonder if a sound change is taking place in how we are expected to say the word. When I was young, Caribbean was pronounced /ˌkærɪˈbiːən/ (with the main stress on the third syllable). But nowadays, it seems to be /kəˈrɪbɪən/ (with the stress on the second syllable). Perhaps the pronunciation of Chilean is also undergoing change.

sewer

This picture (sent to me by Ishamina Athirah) is presumably advertising for a tailor, i.e. someone who cuts and sews.

The trouble is that 'sewer' has two different meanings in English: when pronounced /su:ə/, it is a drain; and when pronounced /səʊə/, it is someone who sews. However, the first meaning is much more common than the second, and in reality we never use the second meaning. Instead, we say 'tailor' or 'seamstress' or something like that.

My guess is that this use of 'sewer' is a direct translation of penjahit ('someone who sews'). In Malay pemotong dan penjahit ('someone who cuts and someone who sews') would make perfect sense.

borf

On Linguist List (here) I just saw this opening pane from a comic strip:

The posting is about the use of 'peak friend'. But what about 'BORF'? What does it mean? It looks like an acronym. But if it is, what does it stand for?

The online Hyperdictionary (here) defines it as:

To uncerimoniously (sic) disconnect someone from a system without prior warning.

But then it says that its origin is unknown.

Keeping track of new terminology is difficult; and it doesn't help when what appears to be an acronym has an unknown origin.

(It also doesn't help when 'unceremoniously' is misspelt. I guess the Hyperdictionary isn't the most reliable resource.)

selfie, hashtag, tweet

I just read a report that selfie, hashtag and tweet are now going to be included in the dictionary of Malay published by the Malaysian Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka ('Language and Literature Bureau'). They will be labelled as 'bp', which stands for bahasa percakapan ('colloquial language'), as they are not regarded as bahasa baku ('standard language').

The rationale for including these words is that it is the job of a dictionary to reflect actual usage. On this basis, I wonder when they will include so and then as words of Malay. I regularly hear people using these two words in utterances that are otherwise completely Malay, so it seems it is only a matter of time before they are completely accepted as Malay words.

he/she

Local languages in this part of the world typically fail to distinguish the gender of third person pronouns; so both 'he' and 'she' are dia in Malay, and though they are differentiated in Chinese writing as 他 and 她, these are both pronounced as [ta] on a high-level tone. As a result, even quite proficient speakers of English in the region sometimes continue to confuse 'he' and 'she'.

From a communicative perspective, does this matter? If someone says:

I have one sister and he works as a teacher

they are unlikely to be misunderstood, though a listener from somewhere such as the UK might find it a bit jarring.

However, breakdowns in communication can sometimes occur. I have been listening to some recordings I made in Guangxi Province, and in the 24 interviews, there are 41 expected uses of 'he' and 'she' and 7 unexpected ones, 4 uses of 'he' to refer to a mother or sister and 3 uses of 'she' to refer to a father or brother. None of these is an issue, as the meaning is clear in context. However, there is one additional instance which is problematic. A female speaker said:

I have a roommate. He er he's live in Shangrila.

In response, I said 'okay', hoping the student might elaborate about her roommate. But when this was not forthcoming, I changed the subject, asking about where she would like to travel to if she had the choice.

The problem is this: it is extremely unlikely that her roommate was male, especially in China; but she had used 'he'. So if I was to ask more about her roommate, should I use 'he' or 'she'? Instead I took the safe option and changed the topic.

It seems that confusing the two pronouns can sometimes be a problem.

for good

My most recent book, published by De Gruyter, was on Misunderstandings in ELF (see here). My PhD student, Ishamina Athirah, is now replicating the work but focussing just on Brunei English. This is providing some fascinating data about what features of Brunei speech may be hard for people from elsewhere to understand.

This morning we were listening to a recording of a Bruneian talking to someone from Vietnam, and the Bruneian said:

when I went to Brunei for good

which the Vietnamese listener did not understand.

Although most misunderstandings seem to arise because of pronunciation, this one is caused by the Vietnamese not being familiar with the idiom 'for good'. And if you do not know this idiom, there is no way you could work out that it means 'permanently'.

Sometimes idioms are really opaque; and this is a fine example. When we are talking to people from elsewhere, we should try to be careful about using opaque idioms that they may not know.

On the other hand, 'for good' is such a common phrase in English that we may not realise that others do not understand it. Furthermore, it is probably quite hard to immediately think up an alternative to 'for good' when we are talking to someone.

nospacebetweenwords

It always leaves me bemused when I see a line of Malay with no space between the words. This is from page 2 of the Media Permata of 19 May 2014.

The first line would be a bit easier to read if it were written as:

Berada di lapangan terbang bagi menucapapkan

Present at           airport           to         say

They must have special software to enable them to crunch the words together like that. If you tried to do it in ordinary wordprocessing software like Microsoft Word, it would force you to have a new line; and reducing the spacing between words is not straightforward.

It is also a mystery why the final word mengucapkan is not hyphenated: mengucap-kan. Later in the same article bertujuan ('to intend') is hyphenated as ber-tujuan and membuka ('to open') is broken up as mem-buka; so why the same is not done with mengucapkan is bizarre.

siblings

I just read (here) that Vietnamese has a word for elder brother (anh) and elder sister (chi), but the same word for both younger brother and younger sister (em). This is the same as Malay, were elder brother is abang, elder sister is kaka, and younger sibling is adik, and no difference is made between younger brother and sister.

Of course, there is no suggestion that Malay and Vietnamese are connected, as they belong to entirely different language families. But I wonder if it might be an aerial feature, a feature of language that extends across language families because of proximity?

Or maybe it is just a coincidence.

menasik

Prefixes in Malay are highly productive, so it is easy to create new words which others can immediately understand. This morning I heard about menasik, which is the meN prefix added to tasik ('lake'), so it means to walk around the lake. Or, in this case, to walk in the Tasik Lama recreational park, a popular hiking spot in the middle of BSB.

It shows also that people know the rules about affixation, as the initial /t/ gets omitted when the prefix is added, and everyone knows that even if they have probably never been taught it explicitly.

The only question I have about menasik is why the meN prefix is used, as verbs with this prefix usually have an object. I would have expected the ber prefix to be used instead, as verbs starting with ber are generally intransitive. But maybe the ber prefix is less productive than meN.

QWERTY and names

There is a hypothesis (see here) that we prefer typing with our right hand, and as a result, as more and more people have become accustomed to using a computer keyboard, there is a greater preference for names that predominantly use the right side of the keyboard. This would predict that John would become more popular (all four letters are typed with the right hand) while Edgar would become less popular (all five letters are typed with the left hand).

Well, maybe. I'm not convinced.

This hypothesis predicts that David would become less popular, as all but one of its letters are typed with the left hand; and the names I gave both my children, Alexander and Elizabeth, would also be dis-preferred, as both are predominantly left-sided. But they were born before I started to use a computer on a regular basis, so the hypothesis is irrelevant for them.

What about Malay names? I have 29 students with Malay names in my year one class at UBD. If we just analyse the names before the bin or binti, we find that:

• 15 have a right-sided name: Nurul Amirah, Norazlinah, Nur Liyana, Nur Bazilah, Noor Atikah, Nurol Izazi, Mohd Khairul, Muhd Amaluddin, Muhd Alqurnain, Nurul Nadiatul, Amalina, Muhammad Zulfadhli, Nur Aqilah, Nur Hanizah, Muhammad Ghazali
• 3 have equal right and left-sided letters: Nur Haidatul, Nur Diyanah, Abdul Qawiy
• 11 have more left-sided letters: Siti Izzatul Aliah, Mohammad Iskandar, Siti Nurfaizzah, Fatihah, Muhammad Amir Syaddad, Emmyra Nurfazrenna, Nur Khadizeah, Farah Mahirah, Wa'iz, Izaz Fahad

So there is a slight preference for names that are typed with letters on the right side of the keyboard.

However, I would be very surprised if this was connected in any way with keyboard usage. I suspect that few of their parents were accustomed to using a keyboard when these students were born. A more likely explanation for the slight preference for right-sided letters is the common occurrence of 'N' in these names.

trengkas

When words get borrowed into Malay, final consonant clusters are nearly always simplified. For example, note the missing final /t/ in: lif, kos, pos, hos, arkitek, and the missing final /p/ from kem and setem.

However, even though native Malay has no initial clusters, they are not seen as so problematic, especially if the second sound is /r/. For example, the following words are all listed in my dictionary, and they all start with /tr/: tradisi, trafik, tragedi, traktor, transformasi, trofi, troli, trombon, trompet, tropika. Indeed, their meaning in English is usually immediately apparent.

But what about trengkas ('shorthand')? It must come from English (I assume). But what is the origin of the word?

hyphenation

This morning, I was reading an article on page 7 of Media Permata of 8 May 2014, and I came across this extract:

telah menerima aduan daripada orang awam mengenai kedai-
fan keluarga itu yang memerlukan bantuan

which might be glossed as:

have received complaints from the public about the pover-
ty of this family which needs help

When I got to kedai- fan, I was confused, as kedai means 'shop', and then I wondered what fan might mean.

Of course, I was mis-parsing it, as kedaifan means 'poverty', and it consists of daif ('poor') with the ke+an circumfix to convert an adjective into a noun. I would have thought that it would have been better to hyphenate it as kedaif-an rather than kedai-fan.

Looking through other cases of hyphenation in the same article, I found:

• hu-kuman ('judgement')
• un-tuk ('for')
• penggu-naan ('use')
• ka-wasan ('region')
• se-lain ('other')
• men-genalpasti ('identify')
• tem-pat ('place')

The rule seems to be that a hyphen always occurs before a consonant. If there are two consonants, then the hyphen occurs between them; but if there is just one consonant, then the hyphen is inserted before it.

Now, this makes sense from a phonological perspective, where a single medial consonant tends to belong with the following syllable rather than the preceding one, as we prefer consonants to be in the onset of a syllable rather than its coda. But I still think that maintaining the morphological integrity of a word should sometimes be allowed to override this placement of a hyphen before a single consonant.

Yes

I have been listening to some data I recorded in Nanning, China, about three years ago. I interviewed 24 undergraduates at Guangxi University, and one pattern I find quite often is the use of 'yes' in answer to a negative question. For example, in the following extract, 'F3' is the Chinese student, while 'Int' is the interviewer (me):

Int: you don’t want to teach in primary school?

F3: yes

And in a further extract, from an interview with another student, 'F8':

Int: you don’t want to be a farmer?

F8: yes

In both of these cases, a native speaker would be more likely to say 'no' to agree with a negative assertion. But use of 'yes' to agree with something is common in New Englishes around the world.

The next example is from a Bruneian speaker, F12 (from page 68 of my book Brunei English: A New Variety in a Multilingual Society, published by Springer; see here):

Int: but you don't remember that now

F12: yes, I don't remember

I predict that this use of 'yes' to agree with a negative assertion will one day become accepted as the norm for international English, regardless of what native speakers like me do.

sepet

There is a word in Malay, sepet, to describe the almond-shaped eyes of East Asians such as Chinese and Japanese. But what's the English equivalent?

My dictionary gives 'narrow eyes', but that doesn't sound like something we would say. My guess is that we actually say 'slitty eyes', but that is clearly perjorative. Maybe 'slant eyes'? My feeling is that that is also insulting. So what is the English equivalent?

I suspect we don't have one, and there is no polite way to describe the shape of eyes of East Asian people. Perhaps there's no real need for such a word!

Teaching Pronunciation

As a phonetician, I usually avoid trying to change the way people speak. I aim to raise awareness about the sounds of speech, to enable students to hear things in detail and also to let them produce various sounds; but I don't generally tell them how they should sound.

However, recently I have been working with three exchange students from China who are preparing to sit for the IELTS exam, and they have asked me for guidance on improving their pronunciation; so in this case I have made an exception. And one of the things I note is that I am telling them to use patterns of speech that native speakers do not use. Let me give some examples.

• The biggest problem is probably with voiced fricatives, as Chinese has none, and /v/ is often pronounced as [w]. As a result, 'verb' may have [w] at the start, and 'never' may have medial [w]. The solution I have suggested is to use [f]. Now, [f] in 'verb' and 'never' is not quite right (according to native-speaker norms); but it is much better than [w], and it will enable you to be understood.
• L-vocalisation (using a vowel for /l/ at the end of a word) is also an issue. Now, this is something that many native speakers do all the time, especially those from London but also throughout the UK and Australia. However, I heard 'meal' and 'feel' spoken by these Chinese students as 'mew' and 'few' respectively, and I suspect they will be marked down when taking the IELTS exam. I had problems getting them to use a proper dark-L (maybe I am not a very good phonetician!), so I suggested making these two words bi-syllabic: [mi:jəl] and [fi:jəl]. Now, this is somewhat different from how a native speaker would say the words, but it does seem to achieve good intelligibility, which is surely the main goal.
• Finally, there is use of a glottal stop for final /t/, something which is again very common in many varieties of native speech. In one recording, the speaker said 'not yet' with a glottal stop in place of both /t/s, and it was a bit hard to understand. So, even though many native speakers would do exactly the same thing, I suggested that this speaker try to articulate all /t/s carefully.

In conclusion, in helping foreign language learners of English to achieve a high level of intelligibility, we should not be getting them to blindly mimic the patterns of native speech. There are various strategies that can be used to improve intelligibility, and that must be the main goal, regardless of what native speakers actually do.

Whether my advice helped the students with their IELTS exam or not, I do not know.

berkesan dan effective

I have previously mentioned the pairing of Malay and English words (see here). Not surprisingly, this particularly occurs in semi-technical writing, where it may be important to match a local word with its English equivalent. For example, in an article on mosquito-born diseases in the Media Permata of 8 April 2014, we find:

penghapusan filaria atau untut

  eliminate   filaria   or   untut

where untut is (presumably) the Malay equivalent of 'filaria'. In the same article, we find:

siasatan entomologi atau kaji serangga

investigation entomology or study insects

where the technical term 'entomology' is provided a Malay gloss kaji serangga.

A bit more surprising is when the same kind of pairing occurs with adjectives. So we also find:

tatacara yang paling berkesan dan efektif

method which most effective and effective

where the Malay word berkesan is paired with its English equivalent 'effective'. This seems rather more redundant. But perhaps adding an English term adds gravitas to the writing.

One more example from the same article might be added:

kerjasama orang ramai dan penglibatan semua stakeholders

cooperation people public and involvement all stakeholders

In this case, penglibatan semua stakeholders seems pretty much the same as kerjasama orang ramai. Maybe this just reflects a Malay tendency for lexical doubling, perhaps to emphasise a point.

closed

You would expect deviations from Standard English to simplify things: they are likely to omit final consonants, drop suffixes, and so on. But sometimes one finds the opposite. Take this sign I saw on the door of a shop in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei.

Note the spurious 'd' on the end of 'closed'. Perhaps one could regard this as a case of hyper-correction: the user is so concerned about omitting suffixes that a 'd' is added here even when it is not needed.

cardigan

When my wife was doing some shopping in BSB yesterday, a sales assistant told her that, as a result of the introduction of shariah law, she might in the future have to wear a cardigan to cover her arms properly. But she pronounced 'cardigan' with /dʒ/ at the start of the final syllable instead of the expected /ɡ/.

This might be regarded as a case of hyper-correction. In Malay, the letter 'g' is always pronounced as /ɡ/. However, in English, 'g' is sometimes /ɡ/ and sometimes /dʒ/, and the speaker got the wrong one.

Actually, a little knowledge of phonics would have resolved this problem. In English, 'g' is always pronounced as /ɡ/ before 'a', 'o' and 'u'. For example, 'gate', 'garden', 'goat', 'gone', 'gut', 'guest', etc. It is only ever pronounced as /dʒ/ before 'e', 'i', and 'y', in words such as 'general', 'gesture', 'ginger', 'gin', 'gyro', and 'gymnasium'.

In fact, before 'e', 'i' and 'y', there are rather a lot of exceptions: 'get', 'gear', 'give', 'girl', 'gynecologist', and many more all have 'g' pronounced as /ɡ/ rather than /dʒ/. But there are no exceptions for its pronunciation as /ɡ/ before 'a', 'o' and 'u'.

Now that phonics is being taught in Brunei schools, one wonders if the error with 'cardigan' might no longer occur when today's primary school students grow up.

tharm

An exchange student from China, Huang Luyin, is taking my module on Translation in which the written assignment required her to find a passage in Chinese, translate it into English, and comment on the translation. In doing this, she translated 肠子('intestine') as 'tharm'.

I assumed that this was a typo, and I asked her what she intended to write. But she insisted that her on-line dictionary, 有道词典, gives 'tharm' as the translation of 肠子. Then she showed it to me, and it does indeed give 'tharm'.

I have never heard of 'tharm', and it is not listed in my New Webster's Dictionary. I have just checked on-line, and it seems that 'tharm' is an archaic word for 'intestine'. Furthermore it seems to be accepted in Scrabble, so I'll remember that.

Even if it is acceptable in Scrabble, it is not a word of modern English, and its listing in the on-line dictionary is bizarre. The inclusion of archaic words in an on-line dictionary is unfortunate, and it illustrates the perils of relying on such resources.

like her

I was reading an article on The Guardian online (here), discussing a book called Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, in which a sentence started with:

In Lean In, Sandberg aimed to help women like her

When I read this, I thought she was trying to get people to like her. Actually, she was trying to help people who are similar to her. As you might see, this sentence is ambiguous.

I believe that writers should be sensitive to the potential ambiguity of things that they write, and they should try to resolve any such ambiguity. It might have been better to say:

In Lean In, Sandberg aimed to help women who are like her

First Lines

I was just reading an article in the on-line Independent (here) about the importance of first lines in novels, and it included the sentence:

And, of course, Pride and Prejudice starts with the only opening sentence of a novel that everyone knows by heart.

Well, I like to think that I am moderately well read, but I confess that I didn't know what the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice is. So I looked it up, and it is:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

I guess I should have known that. But I didn't. And my guess is that most people don't know it. Which just reminds me how out of touch many newspaper columnists are. Most people in the modern world simply are not familiar with the contents of nineteenth century fiction.

Or maybe I am just ignorant.

Where's your plane?

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.

raptai

February 23 is Brunei's National Day, involving a big parade in the National Stadium. In connection with preparations for this parade, I have recently often seen the word raptai ('dress rehearsal') in the Media Permata. Surprisingly, raptai is absent from my dictionary (Collins Easy Learning Dictionary), which is a bit surprising as it seems to be a reasonably common word. Fortunately, it is included in the excellent Pusat Rujukan Persuratan Melayu, together with some helpful examples of its usage. I guess printed dictionaries are on the way out, and nowadays everyone uses web-based sources.

One other thing about raptai is how it should be pronounced. Is it two syllables, like cukai ('tax')? Or is it three syllables like mulai ('begin')? There is no way to tell from the spelling, which illustrates the limitations of the Malay spelling system. For it to be three syllables, the final 'i' would have to be a suffix; but there is no way to tell if the root of the word is rapta or not.

I have subsequently heard it spoken on the Nasional FM radio news, and it seems to be two syllables; so it is a single morpheme.

whom

Traditionally, 'who' is the subject of a clause while 'whom' is the object. So the first sentence in the following (from a BBC page on Oscar acceptance speeches) is just fine: 'who thanks whom'.

But what happens when the same sentence gets passivised? It should be 'Who is thanked ...', not '*Whom is thanked ...', because 'who' is the subject of the verb, not its object.

But people seem to find the selection of 'who'/'whom' rather confusing. Maybe this is one reason why most people are nowadays abandoning the use of 'whom' entirely.

Devoicing of /b/

/b/ can occur at the start of words in Malay (e.g. barang 'thing', burong 'bird') and in the middle of words (e.g. habis 'finish', ibu 'mother'), but it can only occur at the end of words that are borrowed from Arabic (e.g. sebab 'because', wajib 'cumpulsory', adab 'good manners') or English (e.g. arkib 'archive', rizab 'reserve'). Note that, in the last two, English final /v/ becomes /b/ in Malay.

When these words have a final -an suffix, the /b/ tends to stay (e.g. peradaban 'culture', from the root adab). However, if the suffix is -kan, the final /b/ may actually be pronounced as [p]. For example, menyebabkan ('to cause', from the root sebab) is usually pronounced with [p] before the /k/ (see here), except perhaps in very careful speech.

This devoicing of root-final /b/ when a suffix starts with a voiceless sound is similar to what happens in English: 'describe' / 'description', 'absorb' / 'absorption'.

However, there is one word in Malay that seems strange: kewajipan ('obligation') has a /p/ in it, even though the root wajib has a final /b/ and the suffix is -an and not -kan. I cannot provide an explanation for this.

Banana Joke

A couple of days ago, I heard this joke on the local radio station, Pelangi FM:

Q: What did the banana say to the doctor?

A: I'm not peeling too well.

I guess that only really works in places such as Brunei where /p/ and /f/ tend to be merged. In fact, there was originally no /f/ in Malay, so words borrowed from Arabic that begin with /f/, such as faham ('understand'), tend to be pronounced with a /p/ at the start: paham.

The opposite process can occur, probably as a form of over-compensation. When my wife was learning to drive here, she had to attend some initial classes, and the only thing she remembers from them was when the teacher said:

When you are parking, be careful.

Unfortunately, he used a short vowel in the first syllable of parking, and the initial sound was pronounced as /f/, so it didn't come out as intended.

Relaxing in Temburong

This is the view over the Kuala Belalong Field Studies Centre in Temburong. Relaxing there for a couple of days was just brilliant.

While we were there, when we weren't walking in the forest or chatting with friends, it was a splendid place to chill out with something to read. That is something I really looked forward to, as I rarely have time to read simple fiction. And I specially bought a simple detective novel which I finished while I was there.

It was interesting to note that nearly everyone on the trip had taken a book to read; but then we were nearly all expatriates, from the UK, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. I imagine that a similar bunch of Bruneians would have spent their time using their mobile phones, checking and updating Facebook, but few would have brought a book to read.

But maybe nobody reads books any more, apart from old-fashioned people like me. Maybe the modern literacy is contributing to Facebook and reading on-line materials, so the modern generation doesn't read books. And perhaps surfing the net and contributing to stuff on Facebook is an even richer kind of literacy than reading printed fiction. But I still love to read a book.

Temubrong

I just spent three days in Belalong, Ulu Temburong, which to me is the magical heart of Brunei. Here is the view from the top of the canopy walk.

What is surprising, for something that is so special, is how poorly it is maintained. Here is the sign at the base of the canopy walk. Hmm, not very helpful!

In fact, the steps up to the canopy walk can be really slippery and quite dangerous at times. It is hard to fathom why the place is not maintained better. Never mind, the view from the top is quite breath-taking:

te- prefix

Malay has lots of prefixes. For example:

• ber- is an intransitive verbal prefix, so berjalan ('to walk') has no object.
• meN- is a transitive prefix, so membuat ('to do') requires an object after it.
• ter- is either the superlative prefix, e.g. terbaik ('the best'), or it is a passive prefix, e.g. terputus ('be cut').

But what about the te- prefix? Examples include:

• tetapi ('but'), which means much the same as tapi.
• tetamu ('guest'), which is the standard term, but tamu also exists.
• tetangga ('neighbour'). I haven't come across this one, but my dictionary lists it. The root tangga means 'steps', but rumah tangga means 'family'.
• tetikus ('computer mouse'), where tikus is an ordinary mouse.
• tetingkap ('computer window'), where tingkap is the window in a building.

I suspect that nobody really uses the last two, as most people probably generally use the English terms 'mouse' and 'window'. But I saw tetikus in the Media Permata today, in an article on e-payment.

This te- prefix is different from the other prefixes because it can only occur with a word that begins with 't'; so it is not really a prefix but more of a kind of alliteration. And I am also not sure how productive it is. For example, would it be possible to have ?teturun ('to fall') or maybe ?tetutup ('to close')? I don't think these exist; but maybe words such as these will emerge, by analogy with the five listed above. Perhaps in relation to computers? Maybe teturun and tetutup might become used to refer to downloading material and closing a computer window?

Postponed Dinner

We just received a notification from the Assistant Registrar in the Assistant Vice Chancellor's Office of UBD that the annual dinner has been postponed. The message is written in both English and Malay, so this allows us to compare the two. The English version is:

On behalf of the Registrar and Secretary, I wish to inform you that due to unforeseen circumstances, date for the annual dinner has been postponed to Wednesday, 05 March 2014 at 7:30 pm.

The theme remains the same (Black and Bling) and the venue will be at Berkshire Hall, Royal Brunei Polo and Riding Club, Jerudong.

Tickets will be distributed in due time. Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Thank you for your kind attention.

and the Malay version is:

Dengan penuh hormat sukacita memaklumkan bahawa atas perkara yang tidak dapat dielakkan, tarikh Majlis Makan Malam Tahunan UBD bagi sesi tahun 2013/2014 adalah ditunda ke hari Rabu, 05hb Mac 2014 pada jam 7:30 malam bertempat di Berkshire Hall, Royal Brunei Polo and Riding Club, Jerudong

Tema bagi tahun ini adalah "Black and Bling" dan tiket akan diagihkan pada masa yang terdekat.

Terima kasih atas perhatian semua.

The most obvious difference is that the English begins with 'On behalf of the Registrar and Secretary, I wish to inform you that', while the Malay has Dengan penuh hormat sukacita memaklumkan bahawa ('With full respect, please be informed that'). I am not sure why the English identifies the Registrar and Secretary as the source of the message while the Malay does not; and I am also uncertain why the Malay has 'with full respect' but the English does not. Perhaps English needs full attribution of the source of a notification, while Malay needs additional formulaic language but attribution is less important?

The other main difference is the English has 'Please accept our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.' near the end of the message, but the Malay does not have this apology. Again, I am not sure why the apology is included in the English but not the Malay.

Borneo Bulletin

Last Saturday, I gave a public lecture on Brunei English. It seemed to go well. There were about 50 people there, and I hope they found it reasonably interesting.

On page 2 of the Borneo Bulletin of Sunday, 26 January, there was a half-page spread covering my presentation:

I guess that's a good thing, though I find it weird to see a picture of myself in the national newspaper. But I suppose that's to be expected in such a small country.

lemas

I always find it interesting when a word in one language has a broader meaning than its equivalent in another language, something that can cause problems for translation. For example, the Malay tikus can be either 'rat' or 'mouse' in English. We can say that Malay has a superordinate term (with a broader meaning), while English has two hyponyms (with narrower meanings).

This cross-linguistic comparison of superodinate/hyponyms can also apply to verbs. I had always understood lemas to mean 'drown'. But I just read an article in Media Permata about an 87-year-old man who was lemas when he was caught in a fire at his house, and it was then that I realised that lemas could mean 'suffocate' as well as 'drown'.

Public Lecture

On Saturday, 25 January, at 9:00 am, I will be giving a public lecture entitled: Brunei English, Intelligibility, and Emergent ASEAN English. It will be in the Senate Rooms, Chancellor Hall, UBD.

I guess the time is a bit strange, as most people will be working then. But anyone who is interested will be welcome.

Passives in Malay

Passive verbs (using the di- prefix) are common in Malay; and their function is a bit different from passive verbs (using 'be' plus -ed participle) in English.

The main purpose of a passive construction in English is to change the order of the subject and object. For example, if we say:

John was bitten by a dog.

instead of the comparable active:

A dog bit John.

then the main purpose of using the passive 'was bitten' is to get 'John' to the front of the sentence (to function as the theme) and to place 'the dog' at the end.

An alternative purpose in English is to avoid mentioning the agent. So, if we say:

The students were warned about their behaviour.

then the purpose behind use of the passive verb 'were warned' is to avoid stating who did the warning.

Although these two roles for the passive, changing the word order and avoiding stating who the agent is, both occur in Malay, a major reason for the use of the passive in Malay is to express the fact that the subject is not the agent. For example, take this sentence start, from page 1 of the Media Permata of 16 January, quoting the Minister of Development in Brunei:

Saya difahamkan bahawa ...
    I     am-believed   that ...

In English, we would say 'I believe that', but a more accurate translation might be 'I am led to believe that'. However, 'led to believe' is rather a marked construction in English, while difahamkan is perfectly normal in Malay, and this use of the passive in Malay does not suggest there is anything particularly unusual about how the Minister gained his understanding.

My guess is that the passive construction is rather more common in Malay than the equivalent in English, but we would need to look at some equivalent texts in the two languages to confirm that. That could offer a nice little research project for a student.

Text Length in Malay and English

In my previous post, I compared two New Year messages sent out by the Dean of FASS, one in Malay and the other in English; and I noted that although the Malay message seems to be longer, in fact the English message has more words.

In fact, we can analyse this a bit further. First, the Malay has 61 words, but many of them are morphologically complex, so it has 81 morphemes. For example, diucapkan ('said') can be analysed as three morphemes: di+ucap+kan. In contrast, only four of the English words are obviously morphologically complex: 'going', 'taking', 'friends' and 'celebrating'. This means that 66 words in the English version have a total of 70 morphemes. The greater number of morphemes in Malay (81 vs 70) partly explains why the Malay text seems longer.

Next, we can consider word length. The average word length in Malay is 5.66 letters, while that in English is 3.89 letters. So the Malay text really does have longer words.

One other interesting contrast between these two texts is the extent of lexical repetition. Malay tends to tolerate repetition of words, while English does not. And we can see that kepada ('towards') occurs four times in the Malay, while there is no word that occurs so often in the English; and selemat occurs three times in the Malay, but the closest equivalent 'happy' only occurs twice in the English.

New Year Message

Recently, the Dean of FASS, Dr Noor Azam OKMB Haji-Othman, sent a New Year message to all staff. It was both in Malay and English. The Malay was:

Kini kita sudah sampai ke penghujung Semester I dan tahun 2013. Saya ingin mengambil kesempatan ini untuk mengucapkan berbanyak Terima Kasih kepada semua staff atas segala sokongan dan kerja keras abis kita semua selama ini. Kepada yang bercuti, selamat berehat bersama keluarga di musim percutian ini. Kepada yang meraikan, Selamat menyambut Hari Natal. Kepada semua, diucapkan Selamat menyambut tahun baru 2014!

while the English version was:

We have come to the end of Semester I and the year 2013. I would like to thank all FASS staff for all your support and hard work during this time. For those who will be going away or taking leave, I wish you a happy holiday with your family and friends. For those celebrating, have a good Christmas. And to all, Happy new year 2014!

While these are similar, they are not quite identical; and comparison reveals some interesting things:

• The Malay seems to be longer, but in fact it has fewer words (61 vs 66). The perception of greater length probably arises because some of the Malay words are quite long (e.g. mengucapkan vs 'thank'), and many of the English words are short function words ('to', 'of', 'the', 'a')
• The Malay has mengambil kesempatan ('take the opportunity'), but this is omitted in English.
• The Malay has berbanyak Terima Kasih ('many thanks'), while the English just has 'thank'. Are Malay colleagues offered more thanks?
• The Malay has yang bercuti ('those on holiday'), while the English has 'those who will be going away or taking leave'. Maybe English readers are more likely to go away, as they have fewer family here?
• The Malay has bersama keluarga ('with family'), but the English has 'with your family and friends'. Maybe English readers are more likely to spend time with friends as they are in a foreign country?

Bungalow

From page A5 of the Brunei Times of Sunday, 12 January, describing a fire at the residence of the Brunei High Commissioner to Malaysia:

... the fire occurred at about 9pm, damaging a 30 sqaure metre area on the second and third floors of the bungalow ...

Second and third floors of a bungalow? My dictionary defines 'bungalow' as a one-storey house.

Actually, the word 'bungalow' originally meant Bengali-style house. Were they all on one floor? Or were there multi-storey Bengali-style houses? If the latter, then this local use of 'bungalow' to mean a detached house may have reverted to its original meaning.

Mixing

On Thursday, as I was driving home, I was listening to the evening news on the Nasional FM radio channel, and there was an item about some new facility for students preparing for their exams. A student was asked for her opinion about it, and in her reply, she said:

if ada question yang unexpected keluar, ...

if have question which unexpected come-out, ...

Code switching is of course very widespread among young people in Brunei; but the extent of the mixing in this extract is the greatest I have come across. The student was alternating English and Malay words.

Such alternation is only possible in cases where the structure of the two languages is similar. For example, the Malay relative pronoun yang is almost identical to the English 'which', so it is straightforward to switch for just that word. And I am pretty sure that this student would usually have longer stretches in each language. Nevertheless, I thought that the fluency of this mixing was impressive.

I'm not sure that the authorities would agree, though. She was cut off rather quickly, as the news bulletin is entirely in Malay, and the presenters almost never include English words in their news reports.

Second Hand

I have previously mentioned calques, or word-for-word translations across languages, such as the following from English into Malay: kenderaan pacuan empat roda ('4 wheel drive vehicle'), mengambil bahagian ('take part'), and sepakan percuma ('free kick'). Another one is pencakar langit ('skyscraper').

In fact, calques are common in many different languages. The Wikipedia page on calques (here) lists a calque of 'skyscraper' into 43 different languages.

Chinese also has plenty of calques from English. Sometimes it is not clear if a word is a calque or an indigenous creation. For example, is 书店 'bookshop') a calque from the English word or just a creation from Chinese morphemes with no influence from the English word? It is hard to tell.

However, some are easier to determine, and it seems that 二手 (second hand) almost certainly comes directly from English. The picture on the right was taken outside a shop offering second hand goods in Taitung, Taiwan.

Protein

Can you guess which country in Southeast Asia has the highest daily intake of protein per person? The surprising answer is Myanmar; but Brunei is not far behind.

Below is from a table extracted from page 9 of a recent ODI report ranking the countries in Southeast Asia by how much the daily intake of protein per person exceeds 50 grams, which is the recommended intake for a moderately active adult. (It is not entirely clear why Singapore is omitted from this list.)

This table suggests that Bruneians are consuming about 33 grams of protein more than they should every day, which is rather alarming, indicating a huge health problem in the future. But I guess we already knew that.

Of course, it is not as bad as some countries, particularly the USA, Mexico, Kuwait, Belgium, the UK, and New Zealand. But it is still rather worrying.

Selfie

You may have read that Oxford Dictionaries have chosen selfie, a photograph of oneself, to be their word of the year. (For example, see this Guardian article.) Some commentators think this reflects the increased narcissism of young people today. I think maybe it just reflects the ease with which people can nowadays take a photo of themselves and put it on Facebook. People have always loved pictures of themselves; but it used to be harder to take them.

Anyway, here is my selfie, with my wife. Though, of course, it is not really a selfie, as someone else took it. In addition, there are two photos, taken 34 years apart.

The one on the left was taken on the balcony of our apartment outside Taipei when we had just got married in 1979, and the one on the right was taken last year on the balcony of our apartment in Brunei. One interesting thing is that the view is almost identical – it is almost as if we have moved back to our original home, but in a different country.

The other stunning thing is that my wife seems hardly to have aged at all, even after 34 years, while I look about 50 years older. Oh, well, such is life. And it illustrates why I don't usually takes selfies.

Taitung and Dogs

Taitung City takes great pride in being a pleasant place. They have a saying to describe the place:

好山好水

good mountains good water

to which some people add:

好多酒鬼

lots of alcoholics

But, indeed, the environment is very pleasant; and the air seems a lot less polluted than Taipei, or Hong Kong (though maybe not Brunei, which is one of the reasons we live here).

One other description or Taitung is:

狗比人多

(there are) more dogs than people

which may or may not be true. But there are certainly lots and lots of dogs. One thing I found stunning is that most of the dogs are wearing winter coats.

Now, it can get quite chilly in Taitung, but never less than 10 or 12 degrees, so it seems quite weird to see the dogs wearing coats. In the UK, where it can get much colder, I have very rarely seen dogs wearing coats. But maybe Taiwanese dogs are not so hardy.

Yellow Duck

One of the things I did while in Taiwan these past two weeks is turn the television on to a news channel and listen to the news over and over again. By the time I have heard the same item five or ten times, I can usually understand almost all of it, which is just brilliant in my efforts to improve my Chinese.

One of the amazing aspects of the news channels in Taiwan is the banality of some of the items. For example, some of the items that ran and ran while we were there are:

• Some students were dissatisfied with the service in a small restaurant so one of them screwed up the menu and tossed it into a bowl of soup.
• An old man didn't have enough money to buy a canister of gas to allow his wife to have a hot shower, so he stole one from outside a shop. But when he got home, his wife criticised him so much that he took the stolen canister back and returned it to the shop he had taken it from.
• Some youths tossed a number of bicycles into the river, apparently because thy were bored.
• A son-in-law of the President, Ma Yingjiu, got into an argument with someone in a restaurant.
• A giant plastic yellow duck was inflated in Keelung harbour.

This last item was particularly prominent in the news all the time we were there. The problem was that, after a few days sitting in the harbour, the duck got rather dirty, and then the authorities tried to wash it. But the first efforts failed, and after research into appropriate detergents, half of it was cleaned, and then for a while it was a half-grey-half-yellow duck. Finally, just as it was all cleaned, it suddenly burst. This news even made it onto the BBC World News.

This repetition of really mundane news stories is just splendid for me. In all the time I was there, I heard almost no international news stories. Maybe some channels report international news, but I didn't find any such channels. It makes the news reported in Brunei's Media Permata or Borneo Bulletin seem quite weighty in comparison.

Taitung

I spent the last two weeks in Taitung, in the east of Taiwan. For me, it was splendid to be surrounded all the time by people speaking Chinese – virtually nobody spoke English to me in all the time I was there. It is so different from Brunei, where I almost never have the opportunity to speak Malay, despite all the efforts I have spent trying to learn it.

One other thing about Taitung is how friendly and helpful people are. For example, I was walking along the road one day with my wife, who asked me (in Chinese), "Is this Qiangguo Street?", and someone who was just going past on her motorbike answered, "Yes, it is." We thought it was hilarious, that someone riding her motorbike would try and be helpful like that.

I spent quite a bit of time walking with my wife. One day, we walked out to the splendid Forest Park (森林公園), and then back again a couple of hours later, and an old fellow had seen us going and then coming back. He thought we were lost, so he hurried over to help us find the way, and as far as I could see, he wasn't trying to sell us anything or guide us to his own hotel or anything. When we assured him we were fine, he left us alone.

Finally, one more little anecdote: I was sitting in a restaurant waiting for my order, and two little girls, maybe five or six years old, came up to me, stared at me for a moment, and then asked (in Chinese), "Why is your nose so big?" So I asked them, "Why is your nose so small? Are you sure it's big enough to let you breathe?" They went away laughing, and then a couple of minutes later, they came back and asked, "How do you say 'sister' in English?" So I told them and said they should try and remember it for next time I saw them. It is hard for me to imagine that kind of interaction taking place in Brunei, where it is extremely unlikely that children would come and address me in Malay.

can / can't

I was recently doing some translation of a text from Chinese to English, together with my wife, and I translated the following:

你也該努力看看，能不能稍稍改變

as:

you should do your best to see if you can't change things

My wife looked at it and suggested it should be can, not can't. When I looked at it again, I could find no way to explain why can't seems to be OK, and I could see no clear difference between the text above and:

you should do your best to see if you can change things

Given that this second version is more transparent, I decided to use it. But I find it bizarre that the sentence seems to mean the same thing whether it includes can or can't.

Typos

All books have typos. Even my own books have a few, despite my efforts at proof-reading the text again and again and again. And while they can be annoying, a few typos don't matter too much. But sometimes if they are too frequent, they can seriously interfere with one's ability to understand a text.

I was recently reading a short story entitled The Phenwick Phenomena by the Singaporean writer Simon Tay, published in an anthology entitled One: The Anthology, and on page 127, I read this sentence:

He tried to rearrange the Singaporean poetry books in alphabetical order on the shelf next to the last, sun-faded copies of his own book but, as he diet he started flipping the pages of the boob he had meant to reshelf and reading the poems again, sitting down on another pile of books as if un a low stool.

Presumably, boob is supposed to be book, and un should be on. But diet? I am lost there.

The book is published by Marshall Cavendish, and one wonders what kind of copy editors they employ. How can a sentence like that be published?

Brothers and Sisters

I previously discussed (here) the fact that Bruneians tend to include themselves when counting their siblings; so if I have one brother and two sisters, then speakers of English in Brunei would tend to say that I have four siblings.

My UBD colleague, James McLellan, has told me that this comes from Malay, where the following sentence:

Saya ada empat orang adik-beradik
    I   have   four (people) brothers-and sisters

would mean 'I am one of four children', not 'I have four brothers and sisters'; and various FASS collaeagues, including our Dean, Noor Azam, yesterday confirmed this usage.

Misunderstandings in ELF

My new book, Misunderstandings in English as a Lingua Franca: An Analysis of ELF Interactions in South-East Asia, has now been published by De Gruyter. More details are available from the publisher (here).

The book analyses 183 tokens of misunderstanding that occurred in recordings of conversations in Brunei, to try to determine what caused them and how they were dealt with. The basic finding is that most misunderstandings arise out of pronunciation. Unfamiliar words and idioms occasionally cause a problem, but grammar is rarely an issue. The most common way of dealing with misunderstandings is following the 'let-it-pass' strategy, in the hope that things will sort themselves out naturally.

The book is priced at about 100 Euros, which seems a bit expensive. Maybe libraries will get copies, as I feel it contributes substantially to knowledge about what is important in English teaching.

The book is available from Amazon (here), though it appears to be 'temporarily out of stock'. Hmm, well I guess that means someone must have bought it! Something really bizarre about the Amazon offer is this:

So it is cheaper new than used! I know some things, such as antiques and some wines, get more valuable with age; but my book? Very strange!

original colour

I saw this sign on a display board that is being installed at UBD:

This raises two questions:

1. What does 'being original colour coming along with birth' mean?
2. If we assume it is a Google translation from some language, what language is it from?

My guess is that it means 'natural colour', so 'coming along with birth' serves to elaborate 'original colour'; but I have no idea what language it is from.

On the right, there is mention of a German standard for installation, so maybe it is from German.

east / west

Something I find constantly amazing is how bad English is at differentiating crucially important words. For example, the numbers 'fifty' and 'fifteen' are almost identical. And in American English, 'can' and 'can't' are pretty hard to distinguish.

For the basic digits, the biggest problem is between 'nine' and 'five', both of which are monosyllables with the same /ai/ vowel. In air traffic control, people are instructed to say them as 'niner' (with two syllables) and 'fife' (devoicing the final consonant). Maybe that solves the problem, though away from air traffic control, most ordinary speakers do not follow this pattern.

It is interesting that Chinese does better: the digits that are confused are yi ('one') and qi ('seven'), because they both have the same vowel on the same high-level tone. But even ordinary folk usually know it is better to change yi into yao when reading out phone numbers. It is strange that English speakers generally don't know how to do something comparable with 'nine' and 'five'.

Even people working in air traffic control get into trouble with some English words. I just read a news report (here) about a pilot in the USA who landed his plane at the wrong airport partly, it seems, because he confused his hand-written 'west' with 'east'. It is stunning that we do not make these two terms maximally distinct instead of both having four letters ending with 'st'.

Dangers

I just saw this sign outside a construction site near Jalan Muara. (Awas means 'caution'.)

It would be more standard to have 'danger' rather than 'dangers'. But why? After all, 'dangers' also occurs in standard English. Indeed, it crops up 5865 times in the COCA corpus. So what is the difference between the mass noun 'danger' and the countable noun 'dangers'?

I could not immediately think of the answer. We can usually detect a difference in meaning between a mass noun and a count noun: 'glass', refers to the substance, while 'glasses' are either cups or spectacles; 'stone' is the substance, while 'stones' are little round things; and 'wine' is the generic item, while 'wines' are types of wine. But 'danger' versus 'dangers'?

No wonder the count/mass distinction is so fragile in World Englishes!

Forest

I just looked at a splendid new resource that shows the change in forest cover across the world between 2000 and 2012 (here). Below is a screenshot that zooms into part of the north coast of Borneo. Undisturbed forest is shown as green, forest that has been lost is red, and forest that has been gained is blue.

The big patch of red on the left (with just a bit of blue in there) is near Miri, in Sarawak. Overall, the findings confirm that Malaysia is one of the countries with the greatest loss of forest over the past 12 years.

This screenshot confirms that there has not been too much forest loss in Brunei, though there is a little around Muara and also some in the middle, presumably in Tutong District.

It is fascinating that you can easily make out the map of Brunei, especially its south-western border with Sarawak, by looking at the undisturbed green area. On the right, you can also make out Temburong fairly clearly, while there has been a little more forest loss in the Malaysian district of Limbang between the two parts of Brunei.

ucaptama

In English, blends usually involve the first half of one word and the second half of another:

'smoke' + 'fog' = 'smog'

'motor' + 'hotel' = 'motel'

In contrast, in Malay they seem to involve the first part of successive words:

cerita ('story') + pendek ('short') = cerpen ('short story')

taman ('garden') + didik ('education') + kanak ('child') = tadika ('kindergarten')

But on page 4 of the Media Permata of 8 November 2013, I saw ucaptama ('keynote speech'), which seems to be a blend of ucapan ('speech') + utama ('primary') – so it is following the English pattern of first part of one word and second part of another.

I wonder how many other blends like that there are in Malay.

Brunei Times

The Brunei Times daily synopsis of the news (here) offers some splendid material for comparative linguistics because it has the same reports in English, Malay and Chinese. Analysis of these videos provides some fascinating insights into the structure of the different languages.

For example, I have been comparing the English and Malay summaries for 10 September 2013 (available on YouTube here and here). The English version lasts 1 minute 49 seconds, while the Malay equivalent is 2 minutes 26 seconds. Given that they are presenting exactly the same material, what causes this difference in length?

One key difference is that, in the English version, the ending takes just 4 seconds, while in the Malay it takes 12 seconds. The reason for this is that there are a number of formulaic things which need to be said in Malay but which can be skipped in English.

But quite apart from this, there are some interesting differences in the linguistic material within the individual news reports. For example, there is an item on the newly-introduced strain of Laila rice. In English, this takes 17 seconds, while in Malay it takes 24 seconds. Here is a snapshot of the English presenter:

And this is the Malay presenter:

So what causes the difference in length? Here is the text of the English:

In other news Bruneians love the taste of the Laila rice variety but researchers continue to look into new strains of paddy that promise better resistance against diseases and of course the promise of higher yields. Initial results of studies show positive results. (43 words)

And here is the equivalent text in Malay:

Dalam berita lain, rakyat dan penduduk negara ini suka dengan beras Laila. Namun begitu, para kaji selidik terus berusaha untuk menemukan jenis padi baru yang mampu melawan penyakit tanaman. Dan sudah setentunya, jenis padi baru itu boleh memberikan hasil tuaian yang lebih tinggi. Keputusan awal kajian itu menunjukkan hasil yang positif. (51 words)

There seem to be three principle differences:

• In the first line, the English has 'Bruneians' while the Malay has rakyat dan penduduk negara ini ('citizens and residents of this country'). I don't know why the Malay avoids mentioning Brunei, but I have noticed a comparable avoidance of mentioning Malaysia in the Media Permata newspaper, as the phrase negara jiran ('neighbouring country') often occurs instead.
• The English has 'the promise of higher yields' without stating what offers this promise, because this can be determined from the context. In contrast, the Malay repeats the phrase jenis padi baru ('new strain of rice'). Such repetition of words is not encouraged in English. We can conclude that Malay achieves cohesion by repeating phrases, while English avoids this kind of repetition and uses ellipsis instead.
• Some of the Malay words take longer to say. For example, the English has 'And of course' while the Malay has Dan sudah setentunya. Both versions consist of three words, but the English is three syllables while the Malay is seven.

Tautology

I have previously discussed the occurrence of tautologous expressions in Malay (see here).

In a test for my fourth year UBD module on translation (see previous post), I asked my students to translate into English a short Malay text from page 12 of the Media Permata of 19 October 2013 about someone who managed to persuade a hunter to release a kongkang ('slow loris') that he had captured, and it included the following:

... berjaya memujuk dan meyakinkan pemburu tersebut untuk meyerahkan kongkang berkenaan ...

which might be translated literally as:

... successfully urged and convinced the hunter to release the slow loris ...

It seems to me that 'urged and convinced' is tautologous in English, as 'convinced' carries the full meaning.

Despite the fact that avoidance of tautology is something we have discussed many times in this module, ten of the 23 students taking the test included both 'urged' and 'convinced' in their translation. This seems to reflect that fact that acceptance of tautology is common in Brunei English, though one might alternatively say that my students were attempting an accurate rendering of the text and they might have chosen a freer translation instead.

one of

On page 54 of my book on Brunei English (see here), I list the following examples of 'one of' followed by a singular noun:

one of the queen

one of the actor

one of my life's luxury

one of my cousin

one of our relative

one of the tourist site

In the test for a fourth year UBD module, my students were asked to translate into English a short Malay text which included the phrase:

salah satu daripada haiwan di negara ini

Seven of the 23 students translated it as 'one of the animal in this country', with no 's' on 'animal', so this gives us an estimate of the frequency of occurrence of this pattern among fourth year students at UBD.

Siblings

I have one older sister, one younger brother and one younger sister. In other words, I am the second of four in my family. So, how many siblings do I have?

The surprising answer in Brunei is: four. Bruneians seem to include themselves when stating how many siblings they have. For example, I have a recording of one of my students saying he has seven siblings when it turns out he is actually the fourth out of seven, so in my English, we would say he has six siblings. And I confirmed this way of counting with my first-year class.

anak damit

The Standard Malay for 'baby' is bayi. However, this word is never used in Brunei, as bayi means 'pig' in Brunei Malay. Instead, even in official documents, the local alternative anak damit ('little child') is used, as in this newspaper headline from page 3 of the Media Permata of 21 October 2013:

The headline can be translated as:

Mother's milk is best for babies.

This is the only case I know where a Standard Malay word is avoided in official publications in Brunei.

Smart Phone

I recently bought a Samsung Smart Phone. OK, so maybe that's not the smartest thing for an old fogey like me to do. But, hey, you've got to try and keep in touch with these new-fangled thingies, and the lady in the shop assured me that it was dead easy to use.

So finally I got most of it working, though I admit I needed some help with the roaming function and also with Chinese character input. But still, I got there eventually. And then someone called me. What should I do now?

Well, there's a green button flashing at me and also a red one, so obviously if you want to answer the call, you touch the green button, and if you don't, you touch the red one. Seems straightforward, doesn't it?

But, of course, nothing happened. So I gave it to my wife, and she couldn't make any sense out of it either. Eventually, having missed the call, I went and found the manual booklet, which is when I discovered that I should have swiped, not touched.

This might seem obvious to you, especially with those little arrows there to guide you. But it was not at all obvious to me. And I think that any new device that requires you to look something up in the manual is not very well designed. Or maybe I am just out of touch with the way that things are done nowadays, and I should just stick with old-fashioned technology.

Malik / Malek

I have previously discussed uncertainty over spelling in Malay, particularly the use of 'i' or 'e' in the second syllable of a bisyllabic word. For example, tasik ('lake') is often written tasek; and I noted that the name Abin may alternatively be spelt Aben, as illustrated on the two competing signs for the same place (here).

It is interesting that this uncertainty even extends to members of the royal family. The second second son of the Sultan is usually referred to as Prince Malik, as in this extract from page 8 of the Media Permata of 26 September 2013:

But on page 4 of the same newspaper on the same day, he is referred to as Malek:

to save his life

Reading English football news in a Malay newspaper can be quite challenging. Take this extract from page 22 of the Media Permata of 12 October 2013, about Joey Barton commenting on Sir Alex Ferguson.

Saya tidak berada di sini untuk tidak menghormati Fergie - seorang pengurus hebat, ikon, kemuncak pengurus-pengurus Britain - tetapi dia tidak dapat meletakkan kejurulatihan untuk menyelamatkan jiwanya.

This might be translated back into English as:

I am not here to disrepect Fergie - a wonderful manager, an icon, the best of British managers - but he couldn't leave the training to save his life.

What? "he couldn't leave the training to save his life"! What does that mean?

The trouble here is that English has a saying "he couldn't X to save his life", where X is any action. So: "he couldn't write a book to save his life", or "he couldn't kick a ball to save his life" ... But the translator has kept the 'to save his life' part, and then must have assumed that 'lead the training to save his life' didn't make sense, so has changed 'lead' into 'leave'. But it just doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, I looked it up on the web, and I found the original here:

The more complete quote can be found here:

so

A rather common word in spoken Malay nowadays is the conjunction so, borrowed from the English word. I haven't seen it in any dictionary yet; but it seems to be very common, especially with younger speakers.

This clip from the Singapore newschannel Berita Suria (here) suggests that the person being interviewed says jadi dalam situasi begini ('so in a situation like this'); but he doesn't actually say jadi; he says so.

It is interesting that the people doing the subtitles are happy to accept situasi as a word of Malay, even though it comes from the English 'situation'; but they feel a need to change 'so' into jadi. I wonder how long it will take before 'so' is accepted as a word of Malay.

cedok

The phonology of Malay has a rule of vowel harmony: if the vowel in the first syllable of a bisyllabic word is /e/, then the second syllable can have /e/ or /o/ but not /i/ or /u/. (The vowels must agree in height - see here.) However, even official media channels sometimes get the spelling wrong.

Here is a screen shot of a news report from the Singapore TV station, Suria, of 19 December 2012, about money that is paid out by the organisation Pertapis:

The second word is dicedok ('ladled out'). But note that it is spelled deceduk instead of the expected dicedok.

stress on

We usually claim that stress is a transitive verb, so there is no need for a preposition such as on between stress and its object. And, on page 69 of my book on Brunei English published by Springer (here), I claim that the following extracts from local newspapers reflect Brunei English usage:

The driving schools are also advised to stress on the importance of patience ...

The minister stressed on the importance of paying attention to the field of science and technology ...

However, today I saw the verb stress followed by the preposition on in an article about the visit of the Australian PM to Indonesia in the BBC World website (here):

This makes me wonder if the usage is becoming the norm. It is just the sort of change we would expect to take place in English, as it regularises the grammar by making the verb stress behave like the noun. Furthermore, one can focus on something, so why not stress on? Maybe Brunei English is leading the way with the evolution of English!

fall

I have previously discussed calques, where a phrase is translated word-for-word from one language into another. Calques seem to be rather common in Malay, including mengambil tempat ('take place') that I mentioned in my previous post.

Another kind of calque is where two separate meanings of a word in English are found for the same word in Malay. In English, 'fall' can refer to something dropping down or to the season between summer and winter, and we find the same for the Malay word luruh. For example, duan-daun yang luruh means 'leaves that have fallen', but musim luruh means 'autmum', otherwise known as 'fall' in American English.

Incidentally, the American usage of 'fall' to refer to this season is not an innovation. As with so many features of American English, it is actually retaining a traditional word, and 'autumn' is the new word, borrowed from French in the 13th century and eventually displacing the Germanic term 'fall' in England but not the USA.

mengambil tempat

Sometimes I can only understand something written in Malay by first translating it word-for-word into English. For example, in an article on page 5 of the Media Permata of 17 September 2013, one of the pragraphs begins with:

Banyak perubahan telah mengambil tempat ...

which can be glossed in English as :

Many changes have taken place ...

I could not understand the use of mengambil tempat until I put it into English; it seems to be a direct calque from the English 'take place'.

I have checked in the Pusat Rujukan Persuratan Melayu webiste (here), and there are plenty of instances of mengambil tempat, such as:

Dia mengambil tempat berdekatan dengan pintu agar dialah orang pertama yang dapat bercakap dengan Menteri.

for which the translation is given as:

He positioned himself next to the door so that he would be the first to speak to the Minister.

But they all seem to carry the literal meaning of 'take place' meaning "adopt a position", and not the figurative extension of the phrase to mean "happen".

So, is the use of menagmbil tempat found in the Media Permata a new extension of the phrase? Or is it just a lazy reporter translating word-for-word without considering the context? I don't know the answer to this.

inklusif

This is an extract from an article on page 1 of Media Permata of 7 September 2013 about a titah by HM the Sultan of Brunei, who has been attending the G20 summit in St. Petersburg:

... menyokong cadangan untuk memberikan keutamaan kepada penyertaan semua pihak atau inclusiveness.

Baginda juga bertitah bahawa pencapaian pertumbahan yang inklusif telah menjadi teras kapada matlamat ASEAN ...

which might be translated as:

... support the proposal to give priority to the participation of all parties or inclusiveness.

His Majesty also said that achieving growth that is inclusive has become a key goal of ASEAN ...

It is interesting to see how inclusiveness is first glossed in Malay as penyertaan semua pihak ('the participation of all parties') together with the original word in its English spelling, but then immediately afterwards inklusif is used with a Malay spelling ('k' instead of 'c', and 'f' instead of 'v').

This seems to offer a glimpse into the process of English words being borrowed into Malay.