next station

I am currently in Singapore for a few days. I am travelling by MRT quite a bit, and I find the pronunciation of the announcements on the trains interesting.

Between each station, the recorded voice announces the next station. In doing so, she uses the phrase 'next station'. In the middle of this phrase, we find the consonant sequence /kstst/, which is a cluster of five consonants. In ordinary speech, virtually everyone, not just in Singapore and Brunei but in Britain and America as well, would omit the /t/ at the end of 'next', as it is normal for all speakers to omit a final /t/ or /d/ under some circumstances. (Specifically, a final /t/ or /d/ is often omitted when it is both preceded and followed by another consonant, so the /t/ is generally dropped in phrases like 'best man' and 'last Monday'.)

But the speaker for the announcements on the North-East MRT line pronounces the final /t/ in 'next' very carefully, even though this sounds rather unnatural.

However, one could argue that this style of pronunciation enhances the intelligibility of the announcement. So perhaps she has actually got it right. In places like Singapore where there are lots of foreigners trying to understand the English that is spoken, maybe sometimes it is right to speak extra carefully if this can improve intelligibility, even if it ends up sounding a bit unnatural.

SPN21

SPN stands for Sistem Pendidikan Negara ('National Education System'), and SPN21 is the new education system for the 21st century that has recently been introduced in Brunei.

One quite major change is that, from now on, mathematics and science will be taught in English from the start of primary school, whereas in the past, Malay was the medium of instruction for the first three years of primary school. Table 3 on page 41 of the SPN21 book published by the Ministry of Education shows this:This is quite a substantial change and it may have a big impact on language usage in Brunei. But what is quite surprising is that there is no discussion of the rationale for this change anywhere in the SPN21 book.

The only relevant material I can find anywhere in the book concerning this issue is the top of page 15, which says:

    "SPN21 also addresses concerns on:

• The need to sustain and strengthen performance in Bahasa Melayu
• Low English Language proficiency
• Poor performances in mathematics and the sciences"

Only time will tell whether the changes will help improve performance in English. Furthermore, it is unclear if using English as the medium of instruction for mathematics and science will help improve performance in those subjects.

Mixing in BruDirect

I find the material in the "Have Your Say" section of BruDirect fascinating, as it offers a window onto how language is used in Brunei. In particular, the mix of English and Malay is interesting: even in the English-medium section, there is regular use of Malay, and in the Malay-medium section, there is a lot of English as well.

This seems to confirm that Brunei really is becoming a bilingual society, and (at least for those who are computer literate), it is expected that people should be able to understand both these languages.

To investigate the extent of mixing, I looked at the language used in ten separate discussion threads where the original posting was in English and there were ten or more contributions in each thread. I then classified each of these contributions as:

• E : English only
• M : Malay only
• E(M) : English with some Malay
• M(E) : Malay with some English
• E+M : an even mix of the two languages

The results of the 143 contributions are shown below.


It can be seen that there are about the same number of English-dominated contributions (66) as Malay-dominated ones (64).

These figures confirm that mixing between the two languages is extremely common in an Internet forum such as BruDirect.

Keramunting / Karamunting

Because Brunei Malay is not usually written down, the spelling is sometimes uncertain. This particularly affects an unstressed syllable near the start of a word, which may be written with 'e' or with 'a'. Look at the following picture, taken of two signs along the Tasek Lama / Markucing forest trail:

Even though the two signs are next to each other, they do not agree on how to spell the name of the place: should it have 'e' or 'a' in the first syllable?

comfortable

I have previously discussed (eg 20 Feb 09) the work of Jennifer Jenkins, and her insistence that speakers of English in places such as Brunei do not need to mimic the accent of people from Inner-Circle places such as Britain. In her book English as a Lingua Franca: Attitude and Identity (OUP, 2007), she proposes a Lingua Franca Core (LFC) of just those features of pronunciation that are essential for international communication, and she suggests that speakers should be free to choose how to pronounce sounds that are outside the LFC according to the locally prevailing accent.

This seems to make a lot of sense, as slavishly mimicking a British or American accent does not seem to be appropriate for most learners of English in the modern world. The problem lies with which sounds are included within the LFC and which are not.

Jenkins suggests that vowel quality (eg the distinction between send and sand) should be excluded, but vowel length (eg the distinction between the long vowel in pool and the short vowel in pull) be included; but many teachers are likely to disagree with this, if only because there are far more words that are differentiated by means of the /e/~/æ/ distinction than the /u:/~/ʊ/ one. In reality, it seems that agreeing on any set of sounds that can be excluded from the LFC is always going to be tough.

Recently in the Philippines, I heard someone pronounce comfortable as [kʌmfətəbəl], ie with four syllables rather than the three that are usually suggested in dictionaries; and it occurred to me that this pronunciation could never be misunderstood by anyone, so why should anyone worry about it? Furthermore, if comfortable is pronounced as three syllables (as I tend to say it), it contains the consonant cluster [mft] in the middle, which is really quite tough. (In fact, ending a syllable with [mf] only occurs very rarely in English, for example in the medical term lymph and the colloquial word bumpf.)

So, if comfortable with four syllables is easier to say and can be understood by everyone, why not encourage it? I suspect that it will become the international norm one day, regardless of what Inner-Circle speakers from places such as Britain think.

Amok

In my previous post, I discussed a paper from a recent conference on English in South-East Asia that was held in Manila last week.

Another interesting paper was by Prof Azirah Hashim from Universiti Malaya in KL, talking about the occurrence of the word amok in English. It seems that this word was borrowed into English as early as the 16th century, and that its meaning has shifted somewhat from its origins in Malay.

You might think it strange that someone could focus their research on the occurrence of a single word. But in fact this research touches on many fascinating topics. For example:

• history – how is it that the word was borrowed into English at a time when there was little or no contact between the English and Malay peoples?
• sociology – if amok is the best known instance of a word borrowed from Malay into English, how does that influence the attitudes of people in the West towards Malays? Do people have the misconception that Malays have a tendency to go crazy?
• semantics – originally, amok could refer to a sickness, as the cause of people acting strangely. Now, however (at least in English), amok just refers to craziness. It is valuable to study how this shift in meaning occurred.
• usage – in English, we use the word almost exclusively in the phrase run amok. By studying this, we can gain an insight into collocational patterns of usage.

It is interesting to see how many fascinating insights can be gained from the detailed investigation of a single word. People who are considering a research topic might learn from this: sometimes a narrow topic can be extremely productive.

Peranakan

Last week, I was at a conference on English in South-East Asia in Manila, and there were many interesting papers, some of which I would like to mention.

A paper by Lim Beng Soon of SIM University in Singapore discussed loanwords in the correspondence from the 1920s and 30s of Tun Dato' Sir Tan Cheng Lock, a prominent member of the Peranakan community of Malasia at the time. Something that interested me is the origin of the word Peranakan, a group of people who are otherwise sometimes known as 'Straits-born Chinese'.

Clearly, the root of the word is anak, meaning 'child'. But then, what does it indicate a child of? Lim Beng Soon suggests that Peranakan is a short form of Peranakan Cina ('child of China'), and he says there may be other possibilities, such as Peranakan Jawi, where Jawi means something like 'foreign'.

My dictionary glosses peranakan as 'mixed parentage'. And my UBD colleague Nur Azam tells me that, in Brunei at least, peranakan can also refer to the womb.

I guess the word is a polyseme (a word with a number of distinct but related meanings).

Measure Words

In a previous blog (22 Oct, 'pieces'), I discussed the use of pieces with a count noun like apples, suggesting the distinction between count and mass nouns is getting shifted in places like Brunei.

My colleague Ayla has suggested that the use of pieces with a count noun might be influenced by the Malay use of measure words, such as buah for big things like houses, orang for people, and biji for fruit such as apples; and I am sure this is correct.

We might further note that use of pieces with count nouns also occurs quite regularly in Singapore English, and the influence there might be not so much from Malay but from Chinese, which also has an elaborate system of measure words, including 本 for books, 张 for flat things such as paper, and 个 for other things such as people.

In fact, seeing as the English of Brunei and Singapore both exhibit this feature of using pieces with count nouns, it is possible that the use of measure words in two of the the main indigenous languages of the region, Malay and Chinese, has conspired to influence the local varieties of English.

To check whether this is true or not, we would need to investigate varieties of English in places where the local languages do not have measure words and see whether pieces also gets used in this way. An interesting research project for someone!

Mengurangkan Had Kelajuan

On page 4 of the Media Permata of 21/22 November 2009, there is a report of efforts by Brunei Shell Petroleum to raise road safety as part of their Tell-A-Friend initiative. Some of the concepts being promoted are ...

... mamakai tali pinggang keselamatan, tidak memandu sambil bertelefon dan mengurangkan had kelajuan.

The first two of these are straightforward: wear a seatbelt; and don't drive while using a telephone. But the third is a bit surprising, as it literally means "reduce the speed limit". Now, one might try and get one's friends to reduce their speed, but reduce the speed limit?

What is even more surprising about this is that I have shown it to some local people and asked them what is strange about it, and they do not notice anything. It seems that mengurangkan had kelajuan has become a fixed phrase which has come to mean "reduce one's speed". In fact, my colleague Adrian Clynes tells me there is a sign along the coastal highway that says: "Kurangkan Had Kelajuan".

Perhaps this is just one more example of the oddity of language, which so often just does not make any sense. In British English we say "I couldn't care less", but Americans say "I could care less", and these two utterances mean exactly the same thing even though they are direct opposites! So maybe one should not try to analyse the logical meaning of words too closely. And it seems that mengurangkan had kelajuan really has come to mean "reduce your speed" even if that is not what it literally says.

berbuat

In my blog of 28 October, I mentioned the dictionary of Brunei Malay I have bought; and in my blog of 4 November, I discussed some issues regarding the entries for aku and saya. Today, I want to discuss some more issues regarding the way Brunei Malay is represented in the dictionary.

Brunei Malay is characterised by just three vowels, /i,a,u/, in contrast with the six vowels of Standard Malay, /i,e,a,o,u,ə/. In particular, note that the last of these, /ə/ is absent from Brunei Malay. As a result, it should be possible to represent Brunei Malay words using three vowel letters, and 'e' and 'o' should be redundant. However, look at the entry for buat:Note that both berbuat and membuat use the letter 'e'.

An alternative representation of berbuat for Brunei Malay would be babuat. However, just as with aku and saya, the dictionary compilers seem to be de-emphasising the differences between Brunei Malay and Standard Malay.

Younger speakers of Brunei Malay might object that they don't say this word with a fully open [a] vowel in the first syllable. But this could be handled by means of phonology: we could represent the word as babuat and state that /a/ is pronounced with a central allophone close to [ə] when it occurs in a verbal prefix. In other words, there are just three vowel phonemes, /i,a,u/, but they get pronounced in various ways according to the phonological environment.

aku/saya

In my previous blog, I mentioned the dictionary of Brunei Malay that I recently bought. Some of the entries are worth considering.

Have a look at the entry for aku (the first person singular pronoun). It seems the ultimate in circularity: aku is defined as 'aku'!Of course, this is not quite as silly as it seems, as what it is saying is that the Brunei Malay word aku is the same as the same word in Standard Malay.

But there is a bit of a problem here, as most people feel that there is a difference: in Brunei Malay, aku is widely used, but in Standard Malay it carries more of a tone of informality, as the more formal first person singular pronoun is saya.

So, let's look at the entry for saya. We find that the dictionary also seems to suggest there is no difference. I have asked my students about this, and they are adamant that saya is almost never used in Brunei Malay.

The problem is that the dictionary, in giving formal definitions of the meanings of words, fails to tell us how often the words are used, by whom, and under what circumstances. This is a drawback shared by most dictionaries. Perhaps it is inevitable, as a full description of the use of every word would make the book somewhat unwieldy.

One other issue is that the compilers of this dictionary appear to be suggesting that there is not too much difference between Brunei Malay and Standard Malay. I will discuss this some more in a further blog.

Brunei Malay Dictionary

I recently managed to buy a Brunei Malay dictionary (shown on the right) from the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka in BSB. It is Brunei Malay to Standard Malay, which in many ways is quite helpful as it aims to show the differences between these two varieties of Malay.

There are quite a lot of issues in this dictionary about how to represent Brunei Malay, and I will comment on these in later blogs. For the moment I would just like to say that it is a splendid resource, something I really treasure.

pieces

In English, count nouns refer to things that are countable, such as books and pens, while mass nouns refer to uncountable things, like coffee or sugar. In Standard English, furniture, luggage, advice, and research are all mass nouns.

The purpose of the phrase piece of is to allow us to count a mass noun, so we can say "a piece of furniture", "two pieces of luggage", etc.

However, look at the sign on the right in a Brunei supermarket. Note that piece is being used to refer to apples, even though apple is normally a count noun. In Standard English, we would say "ten apples", not *"ten pieces of apple" (unless we are referring to sliced fruit).

Two changes seem to be happening in New Varieties of English, such as that of Brunei:

• logically countable things, like furniture and luggage, are being treated as count nouns
• piece can be used together with a count noun such as apple

Both these changes are extremely common in New Varieties of English, for example in Singapore as well as Brunei. It is not clear if they will become acceptable as part of standard World English in the future, but this seems quite likely, as, in reality, treating furniture and luggage as mass nouns is not very logical when it is perfectly easy to count them. Furthermore, I think everyone can understand the sign shown above perfectly easily, even if it is not (yet) completely grammatical in Standard English.

telur/telor

In my blog of 29 September, I discussed the neutralisation of /i,e/ and also /u,o/ in closed final syllables in Malay (i.e. syllables with a final consonant), which is why kampung and kampong are alternative spellings for the Malay word for 'village'.

It seems, though, that /r/ does not count as a final consonant for this rule, so telur ('egg') is not the same as telor ('accent').

The distinction between 'u' and 'o' is not always maintained in writing in Brunei, however, as it gets influenced by the three-vowel system of Brunei Malay: /i, a, u/.

On page 2 of the Media Permata of 20 October 2009, I found mention of telor masin ('salty accent' ???). I guess local readers would not be confused by this, as they would immediately read it as telur masin ('salty eggs'). But it is rather confusing for a learner like me.

In fact, there are rather a lot of unexpected words in this newspaper. On the same page, there is mention of Persingan Global, and it took me a while to figure out that Persingan is a typo for Persaingan ('competition'). Trying to learn Malay in Brunei really can be frustrating at times!

kempt

We usually describe morphemes such as dis-, un- and in- as prefixes: they cannot occur on their own as they are only found attached to stems. So we have trust becoming distrust, lock becoming unlock, and complete becoming incomplete. Because they can occur on their own, trust, lock and complete are called free morphemes, while prefixes such as dis-, un- and in- are described as bound morphemes.

However, what about words like disgust, unfurl and inept? They seem to have the same prefixes; but gust, furl and ept don't seem to exist as free morphemes. For example, we don't usually praise someone by saying, "You are ept". This is why gust, furl and ept are sometimes called bound stems.

However, sometimes their status can change; and it seems that nowadays some people can indeed talk about "furling an umbrella". Ludwig Tan has just sent me this photograph promoting a hair salon in Singapore:
Note that kempt is usually regarded as a bound stem, as although unkempt is quite common, we do not generally find the word without its un- prefix.

However, this writer is pushing the boundaries of language (something that marketing people often do). I am pretty sure this is deliberate and not a mistake, and it is indeed an effective way of getting attention. This is the kind of way that language evolves and new words emerge. Of course, it happens all the time in all societies, and this is a fine example of how English in Singapore is contributing to the evolution of the language. In fact, it is possible that new varieties of English, such as those of Singapore and Brunei, are hastening the changes, by developing new modes of expression, introducing new words, and generally extending the boundaries of how we can use the language.

'e' vs 'i' and 'o' vs 'u'

In my previous posting, I discussed the vowel in the third syllable of kebersehan. In fact, use of 'e' or 'i' in the closed final syllable of a Malay root is arbitrary; nowadays, standard spelling specifies 'i', but in the past it was often 'e'. And the 1949 edition of The Prinicples of the International Phonetic Association shows lebih ('more') as [ləbeh] for its Malay trasncription of the North Wind and the Sun passage, suggesting the vowel in the second syllable to be quite open.

Similarly for the back vowel, 'o' or 'u' in closed final syllables. That is why we have the modern spelling kampung, but traditionally it was kampong. And the same applies to place names: we have Jurong in Singapore and Jerudong and Tutong in Brunei, but all of these would have a 'u' in the final syllable if modern spelling were used.

Kebersehan

Have a look at this sign, by the side of a road near the centre of BSB, the capital of Brunei. It means "Take care of cleanliness". What is interesting is the spelling kebersehan, as the Standard Malay spelling would be kebersihan, with 'i' rather than 'e' in the third syllable.

This reflects two things:

• In Brunei, there are only three vowels, so /i/ and /e/ are not distinguished.
• In Standard Malay, final /i/ in a closed syllable (such as in the root bersih) tends to be quite open, so it might be regarded as an allophone of /e/ rather than /i/.

Note, for example with regard to the second point, that terimah kasih ('thank you') is often said with [e] in the final syllable.

Nevertheless, it is quite surprising that non-standard spelling is used on this sign, especially as kebersihan is quite common on signs around Brunei.

Confusable Words

In my previous blog, I mentioned the strange confusion between oral and aural. In fact, there are lots of words in English which are pronounced the same or nearly the same even though they are opposites. For example, hypertension means high blood pressure, but hypotension means low blood pressure, and although I can differentiate them, generally they would both be /haɪpətenʃn/. Bizarre!

In fact, languages often do not seem to do a very good job of differentiating words that need to be distinct. In Mandarin Chinese, 'four' 四 is sì (with a falling tone) while 'ten' 十 is shí (with a rising tone). Unfortunately, in much of southern China and also in Taiwan, there is no distinction between the initial sounds represented by the Pinyin letters 's' and 'sh', so these two words are only distinguished by tone. And it is usual in Taiwan to use the fingers to help indicate which number is intended, which is not so good if you are buying vegetables in the market and carrying lots of bags.

What about Malay? Does it have words that are easily confused like this? I bet it does. Anyway, I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which Malay words are easily confusable.

Oral/Aural

One of the basic requirements of language is to differentiate concepts, especially things which may be confusable. So why is it that for many speakers of English (including me) oral and aural are pronounced exactly the same (i.e. they are homophones)? If I tell you that we have an /ɔ:rəl/ exam tomorrow, you have no way of telling whether it is a listening (aural) test or a speaking (oral) test.

John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (2008, p. 57) tells me that aural can be pronounced as /aʊrəl/ in order to differentiate it from oral; but the fact remains that it usually is not.

Purple Haze Mondegreen

There was recently a discussion on the Language Log site of a cartoon by Jems (Language Log).
From a linguistic point of view, there are three things of interest here:

• What does it mean?
• Why does the title refer to Purple Haze?
• What is a mondegreen?

First, to explain the joke: The chicken said "This guy is falling", but the other two animals mis-heard it as "The sky is falling" which is why they did not try to save the chicken.

Next, Purple Haze. This is the name of a song recorded by Jimi Hendrix in 1967. It includes the lyrics "I kiss the sky" which people often heard as "I kiss this guy". In fact, this became so well established that Jimi Hendrix actually sometimes deliberately sang it that way.

Finally, a mondegreen is a phrase that is misunderstood because it is mis-parsed. (It was coined by the American writer Sylvia Wright who, when she was young, misheard the phrase "and laid him on the green" from a poem as "and Lady Mondegreen".)

What is interesting about this is the levels of allusion − reference to something else without which you cannot understand what is going on.

I have explained it all here; but I think that the way we write stuff nowadays is being substantially influenced by the Internet. Language Log did not attempt to explain the joke, or the allusions to Jimi Hendrix, or what a mondegreen is, partly because it is assumed that readers will already know all of this, but also because it is assumed that people can easily find it out themselves. And the assumption that this kind of information is easily available at the click of a button is maybe fundamentally changing the way we represent language on the web.

I guess in reality I should not have explained the joke or the allusions!