Blending in English and Malay

I have always claimed that blends in English tend to combine the first half of one word with the second half of another: 'smog' = smoke + fog; 'motel' = motor + hotel; 'infotainment' = information + entertainment. In contrast, those in Malay tend to combine the first half of successive words: cerpen ('short story') = cerita + pendek; tadika ('kindergarten') = taman + didik + kanak.

However, I recently came across some English blends that combine the first half of two words:

• pixel = picture + element
• biopic = biography + picture
• sysop = system operator

So, maybe English is not so different from Malay after all.

The Wording of a Titah

I was just listening to a Titah (speech) by HM Sultan of Brunei to celebrate Brunei's 34th National Day. What is splendid about this titah is that the full speech is available on Youtube (here) and also in written form from the Prime Minister's Office (here). This means I can listen to it and then check anything I don't understand from the written version.

It is also interesting to see where they deviate. At location 2 min 2 sec into the recording, HM says:

Oleh itu dalam apa pun keadaan, kita mestilah berusaha ...

(Because of this, in whatever situation, we must make an effort ...)

but the official text has:

Oleh itu dalam apa jua keadaan, kita mestilah berusaha ...

I wonder what this difference between pun and jua signifies.

investasi

The Malay promoted in Brunei is based on that of Malaysia; but being close to Indonesia, it may be influenced by Bahasa Indonesia to a certain extent. It is therefore interesting to note differences between Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia.

I was recently listening to the on-line edition of Berita Satu (an Indonesian Channel), and I was momentarily caught out by investasi ('investment'). This is partly lexical, as Bahasa Malaysia would use the indigenous word pelaburan; but it is also phonological, as the 'v' was actually pronounced as [f] (so I initially heard it as 'infestation').

Although words with word-final /v/ in English usually have [f] in Bahasa Malaysia (e.g. negatif, naif, ...), word-initial and word-medial 'v' from English is more often retained (e.g. visa). Compare aktif (in which word-final /v/ becomes [f]) with aktiviti (in which medial /v/ is retained). However, it seems that /v/ is always pronounced as [f] in Indonesian.

page 41 of 40

I was recently asked to review a paper for a journal, and the final page of the PDF document has the header 'Page 41 of 40', which is a bit bewildering!

Further investigation shows that the front page is numbered 0, so I guess that explains it. But still, I find 'Page 41 of 40' rather strange!

terafi

Originally, Malay had no /f/, so /f/ only occurs in borrowed words such as faham ('understand') and fikir ('think') from Arabic and filem ('film') and fesyen ('fashion') from English. However, there seems to be some over-generalisation in borrowed words, so I have regularly heard platform spoken with an initial /f/, even though my dictionary shows it as a Malay word with the same spelling as in English, so one would expect an initial /p/.

Yesterday, on the Nasional FM radio station, I heard [terafi], and it took me a while to work out that it was 'therapy'; and my PhD student, Nur Raihan Mohamad, says that she has seen it spelled as 'theraphy' on social media. I wonder if /f/ might become established as standard pronunciation for words such as this with a /p/ in English.

Schadenfreude

'Schadenfreude' is one of my favourite words of English. It means: pleasure gained from the misery of others. Like that feeling you get when you set an impossibly difficult exam and watch the faces of your students when they read it.

It comes from German, literally meaning 'harm-joy'. But it has been used in English for at least a hundred years now.

The equivalent in Chinese is 幸灾乐祸. But what about Malay? Does Malay not have a word for this? Do Malays really never experience this kind of joy?

Hot Food

I went out with my daughter for a meal, and I asked, "Is your food hot?", to which she replied, "Oh, I love spicy food."

Then I said, "No, I meant temperature hot, not spicy hot."

The word 'hot' in English has two distinct meanings: temperature hot, and spicy hot; and while we can easily specify the second one ("is your food spicy?"), we have no easy way to state the first. Saying, "Is your food temperature hot?" is not English, but I can't think of anything better.

I find it bizarre when languages have gaps like this, and there are concepts that we simply cannot express.

Autoantonyms

Autoantonyms are words with two directly opposite meanings. For example, 'sanction' is an autoantonym, because it can mean "to support" or "to condemn".

Another word in this category is 'left': it can mean "departed" ('The man left') or it can mean "stayed" ('There's only one man left'). In fact, this can give rise to potentially ambiguous utterances with two directly contradictory meanings. For example:

There's only one man who's left.

which could mean one man departed or one man stayed behind. This is because 's' could be the weak form of 'has' or of 'is'.

Interestingly, this confusion is unlikely to occur in somewhere like Brunei, in which the weak worm of 'has' almost never occurs. Sometimes avoiding weak forms can help in maintaining intelligibility and avoiding misunderstandings.

preceding / following

Something I find very difficult to understand is why Bruneians so often confuse 'preceding' and 'following'. For example:

• in the phrase 'one hot afternoon', a student said she uttered [f] in 'hot' because of the 'f' in the preceding word; but the 'f' is in the following word, not the preceding word;
• in the phrase 'my same mother', a student claimed that 'same mother' was followed by 'my'

I can't find any reason to explain this confusion.

majority, would

I am currently reading written assignments by my students, and I regularly come across features of their writing such as the following:

• 'majority' with no preceding article: 'Majority of the participants are Malays.' (In my language, I would include 'a' or 'the' before 'majority'.)
• 'would' to indicate generalised future: 'The description would be based on acoustic analysis.' (For me, 'would' indicates something hypothetical, so no acoustic analysis was actually done. I would have to use 'will' in this sentence.)

Given that these features of writing seem to be normal in Brunei English, should I leave them? Or should I correct them?

I tend to correct them, on the basis that my students need to develop standard usage for their future careers. But I acknowledge that this is inconsistent with a World Englishes perspective, in which we accept regional variation.

My own approach is that I tolerate, even celebrate, variation in pronunciation, but written English should conform to international standards. But I am not sure that this viewpoint is really tenable. I suspect that use of 'would' as a variant of 'will' is becoming the norm throughout the world, and it is only a few traditionalists like me who insist that 'would' indicates something hypothetical.

Word length in Malay and English

Words tend to be longer in Malay than in English. This is partly because English has lots of short words, like 'a', 'of', 'to', and 'by', while Malay has fewer. The only common two-letter words in Malay are ke ('to') and di ('at'). At the same time, Malay has more prefixes and suffixes than English, so Malay words can be quite long.

The claim that Malay has longer words than English can easily be checked by comparing two similar texts. Here, I compare the words in the North Wind and the Sun text with its Malay equivalent, Angin Utahar dan Matahari (see here). The average word length in the Malay text is 6.64 letters, while the average word length in the English text is 4.22 letters, and this difference is highly significant (t=7.48, df=189, p<0.0001). A chart showing the distribution of the word lengths is shown here:

From this, we can see that while two- and three-letter words are common in English, they are rare in Malay. In contrast, there are lots of Malay words with 6, 7 and 8 letters, but few in English.

tongsis

In English, blends are usually formed from the first half of one word and the second half of another. For example:

• smog : smoke + fog
• motel : motor + hotel
• edutainment : education + entertainment

In contrast, in Malay blends tend to be the first half of two words, or sometimes three. For example:

• cerpen ('short story') : cerita + pendek
• tadika ('kindergarten') : taman + didik + kanak

However, I just learned one that seems to follow the English pattern, not the usual Malay pattern, though maybe it only exists in Indonesia:

• tongsis ('selfie stick') : tongkat + narsis (lit. 'a narcisist stick')

I wonder if this use of the second part of 'narsis' is influenced by the fact that this word comes from English? Or maybe Indonesian word formation works differently from that of Malay.

mengetahui

In Malay, nearly all roots are bisyllabic. There are a few exceptions; but monosyllabic roots tend to add an extra syllable when there is a prefix, empasising the bisyllabic expectation for roots. For example:

• cap ('stamp') becomes mengecap ('to stamp'), not *mencap
• cat ('paint') becomes pengecat ('painter'), not *pencat
• sah ('valid') becomes mengesahkan ('to confirm'), not *menyahkan

Note that baik ('good') and laut ('sea') are bisyllabic, so there is no need for this extra syllable:

• baik ('good') becomes membaiki ('to improve'), not *mengebaiki
• laut ('sea') becomes pelaut ('sailor'), not *pengelaut

However, I have no explanation why tahu ('to know') becomes mengetahui ('to know') rather than the expected *menahui. Why is the extra syllable added? Perhaps there is a feeling that tahu is monosyllabic, as the /h/ is weak (or sometimes omitted).

Alfie

I have previously had a debate with John Wells over the pronunciation of the vowel in the first syllable of words such as 'albatross' and 'balcony'. For me, these words have /ʌ/, so the vowel is the same as in 'bulk' or the first syllable of 'vulgar'; but all dictionaries, including the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, show the vowel as /æ/.

I have always claimed that this is a sound change in progress, but that nobody has yet documented it. After all, it is not surprising if the voal becomes more back before a dark /l/ — the same process happened to the vowel in words such as 'walk' and 'calm'.

However, now I am not so sure. Yesterday, I was reading a book to my 9-year-old grandson, Oliver, and the book included the name 'Alfie'. After a while, Oliver said, "Grandpa, it's /ælfi/ not /ʌlfi/."

So, maybe I am wrong. If even my 9-year-old grandson corrects me, perhaps I have just got it wrong!

Written Brunei English

Brunei Malay is almost never written (though that now may be changing with the widespread use of Brunei Malay in social media — perhaps it now might be emerging as a written language?).

However, sometimes words of Brunei Malay do appear in the newspaper. On page M2 of the Media Permata of 20 May, 2017, in an article about the traditions of Kampong Ayer, I found the following six words that are not listed in my Malay Dictionary, and I had to refer to a Brunei Malay dictionary to find out what they mean:

• sira ('salt')
• indung ('mother')
• berselawat ('read a prayer')
• gubang ('kind of boat')
• celapa ('box for betel nut or tobacco')
• memburis ('build (a boat)')

The first three are actually included in the online Pusat Rujukan Persuratan Melayu (PRPM) site (here), so perhaps they are known in standard Malay.

However, in PRPM sira is glossed as gula ('sugar') rather than garam ('salt'), so maybe it is a different word. Furthermore, I am not sure if there is a difference between sira and garam in Brunei Malay — maybe sira is some special kind of salt used for ceremonial purposes?

The third word is actually shown as bersalawat in my Brunei Malay dictionary and it is glossed as berselawat, so perhaps the absence of berselawat from my Standard Malay dictionary is an oversight of that dictionary.

Actually, celapa is listed as calapa in the Brunei Malay dictionary, and I can't find celapa anywhere. Perhaps [ə] is becoming acceptable in the initial unstressed syllables of Brunei Malay words.

While the status of some of these words as idiosyncratic of Brunei Malay might be questioned, some of them certainly do reflect local usage; and while inclusion of a few words of Brunei Malay in an article on local traditions is not really written Brunei Malay, and certainly there is no hint of adopting Brunei Malay syntax in the article, the use of these words represents an encouraging attempt to preserve traditional language.

Siak

In my two previous posts, I have been discussing my experiences in Pekanbaru, where I was a guest of Universitas Islam Riau last week. After my presentation on the Friday, my hosts very kindly arranged a visit to the scenic town of Siak, about a two hour drive away.

About 20 of us set off in a bus and it was about 12:30 by the time we got there, so of course the men had to go to the mosque. That was fine, and I just sat outside and read a book while eating the packed lunch they had provided. After the end of the service, and after the Imam and all his assistants had come to meet me and have their pictures taken with me, we set off for the Istana (palace). But it turned out that the Mayor wanted to meet us. So first we had to trek off to the Mayor's Office.

Now, I imagined we would just go in, he would shake my hand, say 'welcome to Siak', and then we would be off. But nothing is ever that simple in Indonesia. We were shown into a lecture theatre, and I was informed that I would be expected to give a speech!

Eventually the Mayor turned up, and after the prayers and readings from the Quran, the Dean of Arts gave a speech, I gave a speech, and then the Mayor gave a speech which lasted 20 minutes or more. I didn't understand it all, but I think it was about their efforts to boost tourism to Siak.

Finally, we did set off for the Istana, which turned out to be quite pretty and interesting.

Apparently, it was built in 1889, but the last Sultan (who died in 1949) donated it to the newly emerging Republic of Indonesia in 1945, and it has been a museum since then.

The trip was memorable, and I am grateful for the generosity of my hosts from the university. I enjoyed the Istana, but I haven't quite worked out what the visit to the Mayor's Office achieved. I guess they do things differently in Indonesia.

ISELLA Conference

On the second day of my visit to Pekanbaru, I was a keynote speaker at the ISELLA 2017 conference (International Seminar on Education, Language, Literature and Art) organised by Universitas Islam Riau. Some of the ways this conference proceeded were quite surprising to me, though I guess people who have attended lots of conferences in Indonesia would not find them unusual.

Inevitably, the conference began with plenty of ceremony: a prayer, a reading from the Quran, a dance, welcoming speeches by the Director and various Deans and so forth. In this photo, the dancer on the left is holding a casket from which she offered something to eat to each of the speakers:

And here is the Director of the university giving his welcome speech:

What really surprised me was that, while the various people were giving their speeches, virtually nobody was even pretending to pay attention:

People were chatting, or reading messages on their mobile phones, maybe even playing games on their phones, and a few were sleeping, but none of it seemed to matter.

So, was anyone listening to me when I gave my presentation? I doubt it.

Maybe that is how people do things in Indonesia. The speaker is like a television screen in the corner of your living room, and family life goes on with people sometimes looking at the screen but mostly chatting, eating, or whatever. Perhaps that is quite healthy: people in Indonesia are very sociable, and they enjoy chatting and eating with friends, so in a conference the speech or presentation taking place at the front is largely irrelevant.

It is bit like traditional street opera I have seen in Taiwan: you go there, chat to your friends, eat melon seeds and chicken feet, sometimes watch a bit of the show, and come and go as you please; but the idea of people keeping quiet and listening in rapt attention to the opera is quite alien.

I found it rather disconcerting to give a presentation that nobody was listening to; but none of the other presenters seemed too worried.

Kotabaru

Last week, I was in Kotabaru, the capital city of Riau Province on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. I was invited as a keynote speaker at a conference organised by Universitas Islam Riau.

I don't usually take selfies — I don't understand why people go to a beautiful place and then take a photo of themselves. Why not just take a picture of the beautiful place? But anyway, here is a (sort of) selfie of me.

Actually, in Indonesia, people seem obsessed with taking photos of themselves. At the end of my lecture, every single student from the audience wanted to have a photo taken with me. Fortunately, they did it in groups of 10 or 15, but even so there were quite a few photos!

Goodness knows what happens to all those photos. Anyway, I was a guest there, so if they all want to take photos with me, that's fine.

Car Registrations

New car registrations in Brunei begin with BA, and then the next letter increases by one every six months. So we had BAP, BAQ, BAR ...

However, they skip a few in the sequence, for various reasons. For example, BAI was skipped. I always assumed that this was because it sounds like 'pig' in Brunei Malay, and nobody would want to buy a car that had 'pig' as its registration; but my colleague tells me it is because the 'I' could be confused with 1. I'll need to check that -- on that basis, presumably BAO was also skipped, because the O could be confused with 0. I'll keep an eye out to see if there are any BAO registrations

Anyway, I always assumed that they would skip BAU, as it means 'smelly' in Malay. But it seems I was wrong:

Ugama Schools

In my previous two posts, I have been discussing material from a paper on English as a Medium of Instruction that I have recently published, together with my PhD student, Ishamina Athirah. (For the full paper, see here.)

In addition to analysing numbers of students taking English- and Malay-medium degrees at UBD, we presented data on code-switching by Bruneian speakers, particularly instances of code-switching that resulted in misunderstandings occurring. For example, consider the following example, in which a female from the Maldives (FMd) is talking to a female from Brunei (FBr):

FMd: what are what are the subjects ah they study

FBr: in ugama school?

FMd: ah yeah yeah

FBr: erm ah they

FMd: you mean government?

FBr: gov- in the government will be like erm how do you say ah? e:rm (.) i'm not really familiar but what i know is like they're teaching you (.) civics

FBr uses the term 'ugama school' (= religious school), but FMd does not understand it, and she hears 'government school' instead. In fact, FBr then continues to talk about government schools, apparently unaware that a misunderstanding has occurred.

On the whole, Brunei speakers are adept at avoiding switching into Malay when their interlocutor is from elsewhere; but there are a few examples such as this in the data where code-switching causes a misunderstanding.

Medium of Instructon

In the paper I discussed in my previous post, we investigated the medium of instruction at UBD, which is supposed to be a bilingual university. Using the graduation figures for 2006 and 2014, we analysed how things have changed. And these are the results for the medium of instruction of the major of graduating students in those two years:

These figures show that, while 33.5% of students graduated in a Malay-medium major in 2006, only 17.6% of those in 2014 did, which suggests that English as a medium of instruction is becoming increasingly dominant at UBD.

Although the figures for Malay-medium degrees such as Bahasa Melayu dan Linguistik and Kesusasteraan Melayu offered by FASS have increased from 25 to 70, this increase is more than overshadowed by the loss of students of education in SHBIE taking Malay-medium degrees. Indeed, the number of those taking English-medium degrees in Arts (FASS), Science (FOS) and Business (SBE) show a massive increase.

For the full paper, see here: download paper.

Malay Names

Malay names in publications always cause a problem. Publishers insist on knowing what the surname is; and Malays do not have surnames. This is a constant battle, and there seems to be no way of winning it.

A chapter I wrote with my PhD student, Ishamina Athirah, has just been published in an edited book entitled English Medium Instruction in Higher Education in Asia-Pacific (published by Springer). Have a look at the entry in the table of contents:

Her name is Ishamina Athirah; it is NOT Athirah Ishamina. But what to do? I have suggested that, in future, she always uses her married name (Gardiner) — then there will never be a problem. In fact, we've already modified her webpage (see here).

In addition, we have prepared a PDF version that can easily downloaded (here), showing the correct name. I hope this paper will be of interest to scholars in Brunei.

Candies

This is the sign above a shop in Brunei Airport:

For me, 'candy' is a noncount noun. Is it following similar non-count nouns such as 'furnitures', 'equipments' and 'accommodations' in having a plural form in this part of the world?

I just checked the Corpus of Contemporary American English (here), and there are 897 tokens of 'candies' in the 500 million words of the corpus; so I guess it does sometimes occur in American English. On the other hand, 'candy' occurs 10,500 times, so the non-count version of the noun is clearly more common.

Perhaps the distinction between count and non-count nouns is slowly being eroded, led by usage in places such as Brunei and Singapore. Perhaps 'candies' will become the international norm, and so will 'furnitures' and 'equipments'.

One other observation about this shop sign: it reflects the growing Americanisation of Brunei English, as the use of 'candy' (or 'candies') is much more common in America than Britain.

No Bookshops

This is the departure concourse at Brunei International Airport:

While you can buy things such as food, clothes, jewellery, watches, chocolate, cosmetics, perfume and souvenirs, there appears to be nowhere to buy anything to read. Not even a magazine, as far as I can see.

Is this the only international airport in the world where you cannot buy a book, a magazine, or even a newspaper?

I guess people are too busy looking at their i-phones to read.

Verb Usage to Express Future Time

At 10:02 last night, my student sent me the following message:

I'm so sorry, just let u know my assignment I put it in ur piegon hall.

When I arrived at work at 7:05 am this morning, there was no assignment in my pigeonhole. It eventually arrived at about 8:00 am (I guess).

So, here's my question: was my student lying, in the expectation that I wouldn't arrive so early so would not find out? Or is her grammatical usage flawed, and she does not distinguish between 'put' and 'will put' to express future time?

Note: we cannot refer to tense, as 'put' is an irregular verb, and it could either be present or past tense. However, it would be normal to include the modal auxiliary 'will' to refer to a future event. So I don't know if she was actually telling the truth, telling me that she intended to submit the assignment soon, or if she was lying in the hope that I would not find out about the mismatch between the stated time of submission and the actual time.

batteries is free

This is the advertising billboard above a busy intersection in BSB, the capital of Brunei:

I find it amazing that people can spend so much money on making a big sign like that and not bother to get the grammar right. How difficult is it to use of plural verb with a plural subject?

Impact Factor

Academic journals are ranked according to an 'Impact Factor'. This is defined as the average number of citations each paper in the journal receives within two years of its publication (see here).

Now, this might work well in biology, where the turn-around for papers is fast; but it is completely ludicrous for areas such as linguistics, as it is quite common for a delay of two years or more between the submission of a paper and its publication. If it takes two years to get a paper published, there is no way that there can be ANY citations in the two years after it is published.

This is totally absurd; but it seems that the sciences are running the show, and the fact that the way this Impact Factor is measured is ridiculous for the arts does not seem make any difference. Linguistics journals are ranked by their Impact Factor, just like scientific journals.

One of the journals I have published most with, the Journal of the International Phonetic Association (see here), gives their Impact Factor as 0.43. That means that less than half of the papers in the journal generate any citations within the first two years. Quite frankly, I am amazed that it is so high.

One of strategies journals seem to have adopted to try and boost their Impact Factor is use of 'First Read'. About two years ago, together with my PhD student Ishamina Athirah, I submitted a paper on the pronunciation of Brunei Malay, and it has finally been published in the first issue of 2017. But it was actually ready for publication in June last year and it was then made available in a First Read site.

So why the delay? My guess is that the journal put it in First Read for several months with the aim of generating some interest; so it is hoped that, now that it is fully published, there may be some citations within the two-year window.

This is very frustrating, as it was hard to make use of the material when it did not have a proper volume number or page number. Anyway, it is now published, so that is nice. You can find out some more about it from my dedicated website (see here):

I hope that the paper can offer a useful resource on the pronunciation of Brunei Malay. Maybe I'll even get a citation or two within two years!

Circle Line

In my previous post about recorded messages in the Singapore MRT trains, I discussed pronunciation of 'next station' that deviates from the way that people in Britain or America might say the phrase.

Another utterance in which the pronunciation deviates from what would be expected in Britain or America involves the phrasal noun 'Circle Line' (and indeed other lines, such as 'North-East Line'). Consider this recorded utterance I heard on the MRT trains:

Change at this station for the Circle \LINE

The sentence stress is placed on 'line', becasue it is the last word in the utterance. But 'Circle Line' is a phrasal noun, and the standard pronunciation of phrasal nouns involves putting the main stress on the first element: TRAFfic lights, PARKing ticket, POST office, CARbon paper, FOOTball field, TENnis court, SWIMming pool, CIRCle line, etc.

Does this failure to use phrasal noun stress in Singapore matter? Probably not, for it is hard to imagine anyone misunderstanding 'circle LINE'. In fact, the use of falling intonation with the main stress occurring on the final item of an utterance seems to be adopted to clearly indicate the end of the utterance, so it actually has an important role in the intonation of Singapore English.

I suspect that I may be the only person in Singapore who actually notices the difference between 'CIRCle line' and 'Circle LINE'; so I see no need for the MRT authorities to go and change their recordings. In fact, the way the utterances are said probably resonates well with local people

Next Station

In the Singapore MRT trains, the announcements are all pre-recorded using exceptionally precise pronunciation; and the phrase 'next station' is spoken very carefully, with all the medial consonants /kstst/ articulated. Five consecutive consonants!

This is quite an extraordinary achievement. No speaker from Britain or America would ever do that, and it would be much more normal to drop the medial /t/. Then the sequence would become /kst/, which is far easier.

Although the way it is said in the MRT trains sounds rather unnatural, retention of the medial /t/ probably enhances intelligibility, so it should be encouraged.

In fact, one could argue that just because speakers from places such as Britain would most probably drop the medial /t/, there is no reason for people in Singapore to follow suit if they can enhance intelligibility by articulating the /t/. So the way it is said on the MRT trains is really rather admirable.

Spelling out names

In my previous post, I discussed an instance when I did not understand someone in Singapore. How about cases when someone did not understand me?

Today, there was a case when I was trying to spell out my surname, and I started D E T ..., but the woman wrote T E D. What caused this?

The problem probably arose because of variable voicing and aspiration on plosives. My /d/ is voiceless but unaspirated, while my /t/ is voiceless and fully aspirated. But many people in this part of the world have fully voiced /d/ and unaspirated /t/, which means that for them my /d/ may sound like a /t/; and they may not pick up the aspiration on my /t/.

What is of further interest is how to resolve this misunderstanding. My usual strategy is to use the international radiotelephonic alphabet: Delta Echo Tango ... But some people are not familiar with this code. In this instance when I tried to resolve the issue, the woman starting writing Delta ... So that didn't work.

I have always thought it would be really valuable if everyone learned the international code, to facilitate spelling out names and other words. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

On the other hand, I believe the local custom is to use country names: Denmark England Thailand etc. And maybe I should remember to do that.

Exit C

I am currently in Singapore. It is interesting for me to consider times when I don't understand something, and also instances when they don't understand me.

The only instance so far in which I have misunderstood something is when I asked a man in an MRT station how to get to the DBS Bank, and he replied 'Exit C'. But he said it as [esiʔsi], and I heard it as SCC. (Maybe Singapore Cricket Club?)

Three things may have contributed to this token of misunderstanding:

• the missing /k/ in 'exit'
• the glottal stop [ʔ] in place of /t/ at the end of 'exit'
• a lack of distinction between the short vowel in the second syllable of 'exit' and the vowel in 'C'

My feeling is that the missing /k/ was the key factor. A glottal stop at the end of 'exit' is not unexpected (and is probably the way that I would have said the word); and, in the absence of a recording, I can't be sure about the quality of the vowels in 'exit' and 'C'. But the use of [s] for the consonants in the middle of 'exit' were problematic.

majoriti

I wonder if the word majoriti has a shifted meaning from its source word 'majority'. Here is an extract from an article on page M9 of the Media Permata of 18 February, 2017:

Puak Khasi, yang bilangannya tidak sampai sejuta, adalah komuniti majoriti daripada 2.5 juta pwnduduk di Maghalanya.

which might be translated as:

The Khasi people, who number less than one million, are the majority of the 2.5 million residents in Maghala.

Er ... one million is not a majority of 2.5 million. The Khasi people might be the largest group in Maghala, but they are not a majority. Or perhaps majoriti has a shifted meaning.

No Overtaking

Here's one of the weirdest signs I have seen in Brunei.

Let's now have a look at the wider picture, to see where these signs are placed.

In fact, they are at the top of the short access road to the satellite station behind the Radisson Hotel in BSB. While it is popular with walkers, some of whom do their morning exercise by walking up and down this hill a few times, and others use the road to head into the Tasek forest, there are almost never any cars on it. My estimate is that maybe two or three cars a day use this road.

Sure, it's a steep hill (which is why people looking for a bit of exercise like to use it). But as there are almost no cars on it, there is no opportunity to overtake. Ever.

So why is there a no overtaking sign there? My guess is that there is a regulation somewhere that all steep hills must have these signs, and someone has followed this regulation even though it makes no sense in this case. But who knows?

Pronunciation of Tutong

I have been working on the pronunciation of the indigenous languages of Brunei, hoping to make recordings available for people to listen to. Here is my effort for Tutong, a recording of the following passage:

Masa Barui Utara samo Mato Aluh bagagut pasal inayih yo paleng kuat, ado dai urang parantau sabi. Ido setujui inayih yo mala’ gama’ nih nanggalkan jubah parantau ina’, iyo dai paleng kuat. Barui Utara mbepar sakuat-kuat nih. Tapi makin kuat nih mbepar makin kuat dai atin parantau ina ngimbit jubah nih. Barui Utara pun ngalah dirih. Tiru ina’ Mato Aluh mamancar sakuat kuat nih. Sabi parantau ina’ ndo tan terus banuka nih jubah nih. Jadi Barui Utara tapaksa dai ngakun alah yo Mato Aluh ina lebih kuat kod iyo.

Making this recording posed some interesting problems. The main one was that Tutong is not a written language, so getting a Tutong speaker to read a passage fluently was not easy. But it seems to have worked out OK.

Another issue is variation in Tutong. This speaker uses [ə] in words such as lebih ('more') where others might use [a]; and he also says paleng ('most') when others would say palyeng; but variation is always an issue, and this is modern Tutong as spoken by the younger generation.

Rhoticity in Brunei English

Rhoticity involves producing the [r] sound whenever 'r' occurs in the spelling, including at the end of words such as 'car' and before a consonant in words such as 'park'. RP British English is non-rhotic, as there is no [r] sound in these words.

Early accounts of the pronunciation of Brunei English written in the 1990s make no reference to rhoticity, but it is not clear if Brunei English was non-rhotic at the time or if the occurrence of [r] was not regarded as important enough to merit discussion. And it is hard to get hold of recordings to check on the extent of rhoticity at that time.

More recent accounts suggest that about half of university undergraduates have a rhotic accent, and furthermore, it is believed that the incidence of rhoticity is increasing. But how can we check this?

My PhD student, Nur Raihan Mohamad, has recorded three groups of speakers: secondary school students, university undergraduates, and in-service teachers. If we find that the younger speakers are more rhotic than the older ones, this provides evidence that rhoticity is increasing. But there is a problem with this: the school students are less well-educated than the undergraduates, and it is possible that this has an impact on rhoticity.

However, there is an alternative approach. We now have recordings of university undergraduates made between 2007 and 2010 and some more recent recordings made in 2016, so we can compare these two sets of recordings and thereby find out if rhoticity is increasing.

One issue is that knowledge of whether the recording is older or more recent might impact on judgements. So I randomised the order of 21 early recordings and 21 more recent recordings, and then Nur Raihan listened to them and judged whether each speaker was rhotic or not. (She also tried to guess whether the recording was an early one or a later one, and she was basically unable to guess that correctly.)

The results of her listening are shown in this table:

These results clearly show that rhoticity in the more recent recordings is much higher than in the earlier ones: while about half of the earlier speakers had a rhotic accent (as expected), all but two out of twenty-one of the speakers in the more recent recordings were rhotic. This is really surprising: it is rare to find such a shift in patterns of pronunciation over just seven years.

To confirm the results, we asked another research student, Sufi Redzwan, to repeat the listening. And he got exactly the same results: about half of the early recordings were rhotic, while all but two of the more recent ones were. So it is confirmed that rhoticity has increased substantially over the past few years.

This work is written up as Nur Raihan (2017) – see here.

Playing extracts

One of my problems with this blog is allowing you to hear extracts of speech. While I can make pictures and videos available, speech seems to be more problematic. But let's see if the following code enables you to listen to this recording of the 'North Wind and the Sun' passage in Brunei Malay:

It seems to work! In future, maybe I'll be able to make more speech extracts available.

Diphthongs in Brunei Malay

In my previous post, I discussed the number of monophthong vowels in Brunei Malay and suggested there are just three: /i, a, u/.

How about diphthongs? How many diphthongs does Brunei Malay have?

Some people would say three, [ai], [au], [oi]. Illustrative words are:

• garai ('food stall')
• palau ('dazed')
• baloi ('worthwhile')

However, note that these three diphthongs can only occur at the end of a word. In cases in which they occur in the middle of a word (e.g. kain 'cloth', daun 'leaf'), these words actually have two syllables, so we can say there is a sequence of two monophthong vowels.

If a diphthong can only occur at the end of a word, with no following consonant, then we might say that it is a monophthong followed by an approximant. If words such as yang ('which') and wang ('money') can start with an approximant, we can also say that garai and palau end with an approximant.

On this basis, we analyse the three words above as: /garaj/, /palaw/ and /baluj/. So there are no diphthongs in Brunei Malay.

For further discussion of diphthongs in Brunei Malay and the chance to listen to these words, see here.

Brunei Malay Vowels

How many vowels are there in Brunei Malay?

The simple answer is: three. /i/, /a/, /u/. However, things are not quite so simple. Indeed, the Brunei Malay dictionary (published by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka Brunei) shows prefixes with 'e' (indicating pronunciation as [ə]). As a result, while beli (to buy) is shown as bali in Brunei Malay, its prefixed form is shown as membali.

Is this right? If Brunei Malay only has three vowels, how can prefixes have [ə]? Shouldn't the prefixed form be mambali?

The problem is that the vowel in the prefix is often not as open as [a], especially among young speakers (perhaps influenced by Standard Malay, which has six vowels, including /ə/).

Here is a plot of the three vowels, measured from the reading of a short text by a young female speaker:

Note the substantial overlap between /a/ and /u/, much of which is caused by this prefix. If we plot the prefix separately, here shown as 'e', then the overlap is reduced:

However, in some cases the prefix is produced with a more open vowel, so there seems to be substantial variation.

For more information on the pronunciation of Brunei Malay and the chance to listen to the recordings on which the analysis was based, see here.

Bhutan English

In my previous post, I discussed the pronunciation of 'monk' by our guide in Bhutan. In this picture, he is on the left, wearing traditional Bhutanese dress.

He asked me how to improve his pronunciation. In fact, his English was excellent, so I was reluctant to criticise anything; but seeing as he asked for feedback, I provided him with a brief overview of some of the non-standard features of his pronunciation, including 'monk' as [mɒŋk] even though I'm not sure that it matters too much. Here are a few of the other features, some of which might be a bit more important for maintaining intelligibility.

• /b/ and /v/ are sometimes confused, so 'visit' might be [bɪzɪt]
• complex consonant clusters can be simplified, so the /r/ is omitted in 'extract'
• /ɑː/ is generally used when 'a' occurs in the spelling, even when /ɔː/ is expected, including the first syllable of 'always' and 'August'
• stress is generally on the first syllable, even for verbs where it is expected on the second syllable, such as 'subdue' and 'converted'

So, which of these is important? Confusing /b/ and /v/ can be a problem, and so can consonant cluster simplification. But what about the others? I'm not sure that /ɑː/ in 'always' would ever be misunderstood, and perhaps stress placement is not too important in English in an international setting.

In fact, the most important advice I could give him was to slow down when using difficult words. And sometimes, intelligibility can be enhanced by avoiding imitating native speakers too closely. For example:

• 'deity' is an unusual word, so it needs to be clearly three syllables, even if native speakers might often merge the first two syllables; the first time he said it, I heard 'dainty'
• 'eighteen' and 'eighty' are easily confused; the best way to say 'eighteen' is to stress the second syllable clearly, even when native speakers do not! For example, in the phrase 'eighteen years', native speakers tend to shift the stress to the first syllable of 'eighteen', but in order to maintain intelligibility, it is best not to do this
• 'guava' starts with the unusual cluster /gw/, and I heard it pronounced as [gɑːvə], which is not easy to understand; to avoid this, it might be best to make it three syllables: [guˈɑːvə] (so long as stress is placed on the second syllable)

I don't know if this advice was helpful. I suspect that, like most learners of English, he was a bit alarmed at my advice to avoid imitating native speech patterns.

monk

Last week, I was in Bhutan. It was brilliant.

While climbing up to the Tiger's Nest temple (see above), at one point we were walking behind some monks, and this led me to ponder over the pronunciation of 'monk'.

The standard pronunciation is [mʌŋk], but our guide consistently pronounced it as [mɒŋk], using what might be called a spelling pronunciation. (He sees an 'o' in the spelling and pronounces it as [ɒ] rather than [ʌ].) This gives rise to the question: should he try and change his pronunciation?

There are a number of issues here:

• Although the pronunciation of 'monk' as [mɒŋk] does not occur in native accents of English, it is probably quite common in New Englishes. For example, I suspect it is quite common in Indian English. (I have no evidence to support this, apart from the fact that our guide said that he was taught English by teachers from India.)
• Use of spelling pronunciation for 'o' is quite common even in native accents. For example: 'comrade' once had [ʌ] in its first syllable but now it has [ɒ]; the city of Coventry similarly once had [ʌ] but now generally has [ɒ]; and the first syllable of 'constable' seems to be going through a similar shift. Maybe one day we will all be saying 'monk' as [mɒŋk] instead of [mʌŋk], so perhaps our guide is just ahead of us in this shift.
• There seems little danger of [mɒŋk] being misunderstood, as there is nothing it might be confused with.

For these reasons, there seems little need for our guide to change his pronunciation of 'monk'. Indeed, there are more important things to focus on. I will discuss these in my next post.

Language of the Courts

In my previous post, I highlighted one of the chapters contributed by a student in our new book, The Use and Status of Language in Brunei Darussalam, published by Springer. In this post, I would like to highlight one more chapter written by a student at UBD.

Chapter 10, by Hjh Masmahirah Hj Mohd Tali, is entitled 'Coutroom Discourse: A Case Study of the Linguistic Strategies in Brunei Draussalam Courtrooms'. The author attended eleven trials in the Magistrates' Court and also the High Court in Brunei, and she transcribed the interactions that took place. It is interesting to note that the language of the court is almost entirely English, but many of the defendants don't speak English. So everything has to be translated for them. As a result there are exchanges such as the following, where J is the Judge, I is the Interpreter, and D is the defendant (from page 148 of the book):

J : Now, do you agree that this ... this ... gambling ... this ... traffic light thingy is called gambling?

I : Adakah kita mengaku bahawa perjudian ... yang ... lampu isyarat ini dikirakan menjudi?

D : Ya

J : It's gambling is it?

D : Ya

I : Yes

J : All right.

It doesn't seem ideal that so much has to be translated into Malay, and also the Malay of the Defendant has to be translated into English. There is also the question of how accurate the translation is.

Language in Brunei book

In my previous post, I discussed the quandary I had in preparing a News Item for our Faculty website − specifically, whether to feature pictures of important people or to focus more on the contents of the presentations at our recent Brunei-Malaysia Forum.

I faced a similar decision regarding the News Item (see here) for the launch of our book The Use and Status of Language in Brunei Darussalam, recently published by Springer. Should I show pictures of people attending the launch (as is the custom in Brunei)? Or should I focus instead on some of the chapters in the book?

In the end, I went for the first option, partly because there were other books being launched. But now I would like to focus on the contents of some of the chapters, particularly those written by students.

Chapter 4, by Susilawati Japri, analyses the language of shop signs in a modern shopping centre in Brunei. Now, by law, all signs are supposed to include the name in Jawi, and the Jawi is supposed to be twice the size of other scripts. Here is a sign that includes Jawi, though it does not seem to be twice the size of the Rumi script:

However, not all shops follow these rules:

In fact, the research reports that 42% of the shops in the three shopping malls in the Times Square Area (near Brunei's international airport) do not include Jawi.

In my next posts, I will outline the contents of chapters written by three more students.

Brunei-Malaysia Forum

In my previous post, I discussed the tendency for local news reports to highlight the participation of members of the Royal Family or other dignitaries in events that they attend. It is similar for reports about conferences or seminars, in which the Guest of Honour is invariably mentioned, and also the Keynote Speakers, but the other individual presentations may get less coverage. Furthermore, there are usually lots of pictures of people, but I think it would be more interesting to see a few charts or other details from some of the presentations.

In preparing a 'News Item' for our Faculty website regarding our recent Brunei-Malaysia Forum (see here), I faced a quandary: should I show a picture of all the important people lined up, as is the usual practice? Or should I focus more on the contents of some of the presentations?

In the end, I adopted a compromise: I included the obligatory picture of the important guests:

But, after that, I showed some Figures from student presentations, two from UBD students and two from the University of Malaya.

The first is from the presentation by Blessing Gweshengwe of UBD entitled 'Is there congruity between the conventional poverty measures & contemporary conceptualisation of poverty?'

The second is from the presentation by Mahazril ‘Aini Yaacob and Dr Siti Hajar Abu Bakar of the University of Malaya entitled 'Can we own a home? Road to independent living'

The third is from the presentation by Nur Muhammad Sufi Bin Redzwan of UBD entitled 'A Comparison of Rhoticity between Brunei and Singapore English'.

Finally, this figure is from the presentation by Manimegalai A/P Ambikapathy and Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hasmah Zanuddin of the University of Malaya entitled 'Visual Framing of the “Lahad Datu” conflict coverage in Malaysian mainstream newspapers'.

(If you want to know more about these presentations, you'll have to access the website.)

I hope that, by starting with a picture of important people and then focusing on student presentations, I have achieved a balance but also managed to celebrate the participation of students.

Performance at ISB

On page 1 of Media Permata of 18 November 2016, there are the following two pictures with a four-line caption below them, describing the performance of a band at ISB:

On page 1 of the Borneo Bulletin on the same day, there are two similar pictures (one of them is clearly shared with Media Permata) describing the same event.

Though the event is the same, there are some interesting differences in the text describing it. Here is the Malay version in Media Permata:

Yang Teramat Mulia Pengiran Muda ‘Abdul Muntaqim dan Yang Teramat Mulia Pengiran Anak Muneerah Muneerah Madhul Bolkiah kelmarin berkenan berangkat menyaksikan persembahan pencaragam Armada ke-7 Tentera Laut Amerika Syarikat (AS) dan Angkatan Bersenjata Diraja Brunei (ABDB) di Teater Sekolah Antarabangsa Brunei (ISB). Berangkat sama ialah Yang Amat Mulia Pengiran Anak ‘Abdul Haseeb dan Yang Amat Mulia Pengiran Anak Raqeeqah Raayatul Bolqiah. – Berita Lanjust di Muka 3

And here is the English version in the Borneo Bulletin:

Some 800 students enjoyed an electrifying performance by the US Navy 7th Fleet Band, supportedby the Roya Armed Forces (RBAF) Band, yesterday, at the International School Brunei (ISB) Theatre. Among those who attended the musical performance were Yang Teramat Mulia Pengiran Muda ‘Abdul Muntaqim ibni Duli Yang Teramat Mulia Paduka Seri Pengiran Muda Mahkota Pengiran Muda Haji Al-Muhtadee Billah and Yang Teramat Mulia Pengiran Anak Muneerah Muneerah Madhul Bolkiah binti Duli Yang Teramat Mulia Paduka Seri Pengiran Muda Mahkota Pengiran Muda Haji Al-Muhtadee Billah – (Full Report on Page 3)

The main differences between them are as follows:

• The Malay version foregrounds the royal prince and princess; in contrast, the English version only introduces them in the second sentence.
• The Malay version has a shorter version of their names, not listing their father's name; in contrast, the English version gives their full names, including their father: ibni/anak Duli Yang Teramat Mulia Paduka Seri Pengiran Muda Mahkota Pengiran Muda Haji Al-Muhtadee Billah.
• The Malay version lists two additional royal attendees: Yang Amat Mulia Pengiran Anak ‘Abdul Haseeb and Yang Amat Mulia Pengiran Anak Raqeeqah Raayatul Bolqiah; in contrast, the English version does not.
• The Malay version only mentions the royal attendees; in contrast, the English version states that 800 students enjoyed the performance.
• The Malay version omits any comment on the quality of the performance; in contrast, the English states that it was 'electrifying'.

Given the importance of the Royal Family in Brunei, it is not surprising that the Malay version foregrounds the attendance of the prince and princess. And it is also not surprising that more royal persons are listed in the Malay version.

The shortening of the names in the Malay but not the English is a little surprising. Perhaps that was done to ensure there was enough space to include the extra two people.

Borrowings into Malay

On page 13 of the Media Permata of 18 November, there is a short article (sourced from the Malaysian Bernama organisation) with the heading:

Jangan terlalu banyak guna kata pinjaman - Dr Rais Yatim

which can be translated as:

Don't use too many borrowed words - Dr Rais Yatim

Dr Rais Yatim is a Malaysian politician, and he was making a speech urging the avoidance of borrowed words primarily from English. It is rather ironic, therefore, that the article includes the following words of Malay, all of which are borrowed from English: proses, sistem, buku, akademi, and tradisional.

Is it possible to avoid borrowings entirely? Are there indigenous words that could have been used instead of these borrowings? I suspect it is not possible to avoid all borrowings. But perhaps he is right that people should try to avoid using too many, and they might be encouraged to use an indigenous word when there is a suitable candidate.

An alternative viewpoint is that borrowings into Malay don't matter. Maybe one of the strengths of Malay is its ability to absorb words from other languages (a bit like English, really). So perhaps, instead of decrying too much borrowing, we should celebrate the ease with which Malay borrows words from English.

The Streisand Effect

The Streisand Effect describes a situation where efforts to prevent access to data have the opposite effect and actually increase access to that data. (It arises from an incident in 2003 when Barbara Streisand tried to prevent people from accessing photographs of her beach-front property; but as a result of her efforts, lots and lots of people now access those photographs. See the Wikipedia article, which helpfully shows a nice picture of Barbara Streisand's house.)

On page 1 of the Media Permata of 18 November 2016, there is an article with the headline:

Laporan meganews306 tidak benar

which might be translated as:

The report on meganews306 is not true

The article states that a report on the website www.meganews360.com about His Royal Highness Prince 'Abdul Malik is not true. Now, I have no idea what this report is about, so I suppose I'd better go to the website and find out.

This raises a question about what we should do when inaccurate reports are published. Should we try to deny them, and thereby incur the risk of making the report more widely known? Or should we keep quiet and let the inaccurate report remain unchallenged? I have no answer to this dilemma.

Initialisms in Malaysia

I have previously mentioned the frequent occurrence of Malay-English initialisms in Brunei (e.g. here). Here are some Malay-English initialisms from a single article on page 6 of the 2 November 2016 edition of Berita Harian, a newspaper published in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. See if you can figure out what the English expansion of each initialism is:

• Jawatankuasa Kira-kira Wang Negara (PAC)
• Teknologi Maklumat dan Komunikasi (ICT)
• Makmal Pengurusan Nilai (VML)
• Persekitaran Pembelajaran Maya (VLE)

All of them except ICT had me stumped, and I had to search the Internet to figure them out. Here are the answers:

• PAC : Public Accounts Committee
• ICT : Information and Communication Technology
• VML : Value Management Lab
• VLE : Virtual Learning Environment

I guess they are not a problem if you see them often and so become familiar with them. But they had me stumped, and it was hard for me to understand the article without being able to expand them.

Scopus

Just like most universities around the world, academics at UBD are judged by their publications, and in particular by the number of times they are cited. And Scopus is the key platform for determining these things.

The problem with Scopus is that it focuses on journal articles and tends to overlook books, and for the social sciences, books and book chapters can be vitally important. But quite beyond that, Scopus is seriously flawed

I recently checked my Scopus listing, and I was surprised to see a book review shown. Now, I write quite a lot of book reviews, often in top journals, but they have never been shown in Scopus before. So it was a nice surprise to see this one listed. The screen shot of my three most recent Scopus entries is shown here:

However, on looking more closely, I realised that it is not actually a book review; it is a corrigendum to a book review.

What happened is this: I wrote a book review and it was published in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association. Subsequently, it was discovered that I had typed the name of one of the editors wrongly, and in the next issue of the journal, a correction was published (a corrigendum). And that is what is listed in Scopus!

How awful is that? I make a mistake, and as a result I get an extra listing in Scopus!

I considered deleting it, but then I thought that it is such a neat illustration of how awful Scopus is that I'll just leave it.

Calais

I was listening to the midday news on RTB Nasional FM today, and once again I heard Calais pronounced as /kʌlaɪs/ rather than the expected /kæleɪ/. Given the frequency with which this name crops up at the moment, as the French police are trying to clear the migrants camped there, one would have thought that RTB announcers might try and get it right.

Or maybe the standard pronunciation in Malay actually is /kʌlaɪs/. Given the reasonably close association between pronunciation and spelling in Malay, perhaps the norm is to closely follow the spelling for all foreign names.

However, if that is the case, surely it should be /tʃʌlaɪs/ rather than /kʌlaɪs/, as 'c' is always pronounced as /tʃ/ in Malay.

organisasi

I have sometimes previously discussed the tension between use of a native word of Malay and an equivalent borrowed word (e.g. petua vs. 'tips'). Sometimes the relevant authorities promote an indigenous word even when speakers actually use a borrowed word.

This is from a news item broadcast by Berita Suria in Singapore on 6 March 2015. The speaker, Ahmad Md Tahir, a local writer, says that, in order to promote their works, "there must be cooperation between writers, publishers, lovers of language, students and organisations."

The words at the bottom suggest he uses the indigenous word pertubuhan; but in fact, he uses the borrowed word organisasi. It is interesting that Berita Suria think it is appropriate to replace organisasi with pertubuhan even though most people would accept the former as a word of Malay, given that it is generally included in Malay dictionaries and its pronunciation and spelling have been adapted for Malay.

Raspberry Picking

My granddaughter, Elsie, aged 5 and a half, loves to write. Here is a little story she wrote on yellow stick-it sheets while we were visiting in July

While she does not know the spelling of some words, such as 'lady' and 'bush', she is pretty good at guessing, based on the pronunciation. And I have to admit that I had to look up 'raspberry' in a dictionary to find out how to spell it. (Why is there a 'p' in the middle?). Here is the second sheet.

Note that 'behind' and 'frightened' follow the pronunciation quite closely, even if they deviate from standard spelling. It is hardly surprising that she omits the slient 'gh' in 'frightened'.

One rule of phonics that she has not yet learned is that 'c' followed by 'e' or 'i' is always pronounced as /s/. No doubt she will learn this rule one day, and then she will no longer put a 'c' in 'basket'.

Here is the third sheet:

One other rule of phonics that she has not yet learned is that a short vowel, as in the first syllable of 'happened', needs to be followed by a doubled letter; on the basis of this rule, 'hapend' would be pronounced with /eɪ/ rather than /æ/. This is another rule that she will one day learn.

Here are the fourth and fifth sheets:

Overall, her spelling is pretty impressive, and she makes an excellent attempt to spell words that she does not know. At school, they are now taught phonics, and when she is reading, she is really good at sounding out words she has not seen before and guessing what they are. It seems that the teaching of phonics can be quite helpful in enabling children to read and write.

Faux Amis - prestasi

Faux Amis ('false friends') are words that involve a shift in meaning after they have been borrowed from one language to another. Or, more technically, they are words that have the same etymological root but a different meaning in two languages. For example, in French, the word librarie means 'bookshop', not 'library', and abuser means 'take advantage of', not 'abuse'. It is easy to make mistakes as a result of faux amis when speaking a foreign language.

In Malay, I find concrete things not too different to handle. For example, it is quite easy to remember that bonet refers to the back of a car, not its front. However, I have more trouble with abstract concepts.

The word prestasi presumably comes from the English 'prestige'. However, it means 'achievement' rather than 'prestige'. I always stumble over it, even though it is quite a common word. For example, on page 13 of Media Permata of 15 October 2016, I had to pause when reading the paragraph that started:

Dengan prestasi yang semakin meningkat, ...

which might be glossed as:

With achievements that are constantly increasing, ...

UBD Convocation

At the UBD Convocation yesterday, I was interested to hear how many English words occurred in the Sultan's titah, which you would expect to be entirely in Malay. I noted the following, though I am sure there were more: marketability, employability, life-long learning, knowledge-based society, relevance, professional and global. That is in addition to the following, which might all nowadays be regarded as words of Malay: program, ekonomi, institusi, inisiatif, graduan, identiti, kualiti and senat.

Are there no Malay equivalents for these terms? Although it is no doubt possible to express marketability in Malay, it's probably true that there is no easy equivalent; so use of the English word is more efficient.

Some people might decry the lack of indigenous words for these concepts; others might celebrate the flexibility of Malay that allows it to absorb words from other languages so easily. Anyway, perhaps marketability soon will be regarded as a word of Malay (in which case, presumably, it will be spelled with a final 'i').

gramar and grampar

This is a picture drawn by my granddaughter, Elsie, aged 6.

Note how she spells Grandma and Grandpa. She is following the way she says the words quite accurately: she has a non-rhotic accent, so it is not surprising that she spells /ɑː/ at the end of both words as 'ar'. Secondly, she omits the /d/ in both words, and then the /n/ is next to a bilabial sound (/m/ or /p/), so it gets assimilated to [m].

Her spelling of these words shows quite a sophisticated ability to spell out words that she has probably never seen written. One day, she will no doubt learn the standard spelling. But, in the meantime, her ability to guess the spelling of words based on her pronunciation is quite impressive.

Goodness knows what happened to my hands; but she accurately shows that I don't have much hair!

/æ/ vs /eɪ/

In my phonetics class yesterday, I asked my students to transcribe 'complicated'; and half of them used /æ/ instead of /eɪ/ in the third syllable. The fact that they cannot differentiate between /æ/ and /eɪ/ confirms that speakers of English in Brunei tend to merge the TRAP and FACE vowels.

Why should this be? It is quite different form Singapore, where people tend to have a close monophthong for the FACE vowel, and this vowel is quite distinct from the TRAP vowel. (The latter tends to be merged with DRESS, and both are pronounced as [ɛ].)

The first thing to notice is that there is a systematic link between /æ/ and /eɪ/ in English. For example, 'vane' has /eɪ/ while 'vanity' has /æ/, and the same is true for 'sane'/'sanity', 'profane'/'profanity', 'nation'/'national' and many other pairs of words. And it is not surprising if some speakers use the same vowel in both the base form of the word ('vane', 'sane', etc) and its derivative ('vanity', 'sanity', etc.). Furthermore, there are a few words in which there is variability: in both 'patent' and 'patriot', some speakers have /æ/ while others have /eɪ/.

However, this does not explain why there is a different pattern in Singapore and Brunei. And for this, we must consider the dominant indigenous languages.

Most Singaporeans are Chinese, so we would expect their English to be influenced by Chinese. Now, Chinese has lots of words with the /ei/ diphthong, such as 给 (gěi, 'give') and 黑 (hēi, 'black). However, there is no such diphthong in Malay. In Malay, /ai/ can occur at the end of words such as cukai 'tax' and sungai 'river' (though we can actually argue that these are monophthongs followed by an approximant; see here), but the /ei/ diphthong does not occur.

Then we might note what happens to English words with /eɪ/ when they are borrowed into Malay. In most cases, /a/ is used: radio, status, stadium, agensi and templat all have /a/ while the original English has /eɪ/ (though there are some exceptions: kek 'cake' and ejen 'agent' bother have /e/ rather than /a/).

Next, we might note that, according to my dictionary, 'plate' becomes plat in Malay (as in plat nombor), while 'plaque' becomes plak, so we can see that though the vowel is different in these two words in English, it is the same in Malay.

It seems that it is probably this influence from Malay, particularly the way that English words are borrowed into Malay, that influences the pronunciation of English in Brunei.

arcing

I've previously mentioned the problem of adjectives and verbs ending in 'c'. If you want to add 'ed' or 'ing' to 'panic' or picnic', you need an extra 'k', so we get 'panicked' and 'picnicking'.

But what about words like 'chic'? What is its comparative form (meaning "more chic")? If you write 'chicer', it looks like the 'c' is pronounced as [s]; but 'chicker' is no good. So it is basically not possible to write the comparative of 'chic', even though the word can be said.

And if 'to mic' is a verb (meaning "to put a microphone on someone"), what is its progressive form? If someone is doing it to you, are they 'micing' you? Or maybe 'micking' you? Neither one works.

I just saw another example of this in a BBC report of a football game between Wales and Moldova. If 'arc' is a verb (meaning "to move in an arc"), what is its progressive form (or, in this case, its derived adjective)?

The BBC used 'arcing', but that does not work for me, as 'c' followed by 'i' must be pronounced as [s], not [k]. But what alternative is there? It seems that 'arcking' isn't quite right.

So there doesn't seem to be an easy solution. I guess the rule that 'c' followed by 'e' or 'i' is always pronounced as [s] now has a few exceptions.