never event

A never event is a medical term for an event that should not have happened. According Wikipedia, never events are 'inexcusable outcomes in a health care setting'.

In this week's edition of his splendid weekly e-magazine WorldWideWords, Michael Quinion tells us that there were 326 never events in the UK last year, including 161 instances when a foreign object was left inside someone's body after an operation, and 70 cases in which a patient underwent surgery on the wrong part of the body.

Of course, I am sure that nothing like that would ever happen here in Brunei....

Abbreviations in Malay

In my previous post, I discussed whether texting might be harmful to literacy. The view among many linguists is that the creative and playful use of language may actually be helpful, and that English spelling may in fact be improved by the regular use of texting abbreviations, because they raise phonological awareness about the structure of words. My MA student, Ranjeta Ramanathan, is doing some interesting work on this among Brunei undergraduates, and I will summarise a few of her results when the thesis is completed.

In Brunei, there is the usual concern that texting abbreviations are destroying the ability of young people to write properly and also to spell, and this extends into the spelling of Malay. What is ironic here is that abbreviations in Malay are really common in official materials, including dictionaries. For example, here are some of the abbreviations found in the excellent on-line Pusat Rujukan Persuratan Melayu @ DBP:

• dgn : dengan ('with')
• dll : dan lain-lain ('and others')
• dr : dari ('from')
• dlm : dalam ('in')
• drpd : daripada ('from')
• kpd : kepada ('to')
• pd : pada ('at')
• sbg : sebagai ('as')
• sso : seseorang ('someone')
• ttg : tentang ('about')
• utk : untuk ('for')
• yg : yang ('which')

A pattern here seems to be that vowels tend to be omitted unless they occur at the start of the word (utk) or morpheme (sso = sese+orang), and that 'n' gets omitted if it is before another consonant (dgn, ttg, yg).

It is not just dictionaries and other reference materials that use lots of abbreviations. I note that the subtitles in the Astro Awani news channel have even more regular abbreviations. I'll try and collate some of them one of these days.

Ranjeta finds that Bruneian students similarly use lots of abbreviations when they incorporate Malay into the text messages they send. But can you blame them when they see such abbreviations used so widely in official materials? And, finally, is there any evidence that such use of abbreviations is harmful to literacy, in Malay or in English?

Texting

Did you know that, in 2010, the average American teenager sent over 3000 text messages per month? (See here). That means about 100 message a day. And, presumably, the number is even higher today.

Is that problematic? Is it undermining their ability to do their homework and participate in other more creative activities? Or does it, instead, reflect a natural sociability and creativity in a vibrant, every-evolving medium?

When my two children were teenagers, they spent hours every day on the phone. In many ways, texting is an improvement. First, it doesn't block up the phone line like it used to. Second, it is possible to do other things, like homework, while intermittently answering text messages. In comparison, talking on the phone seems to be more disruptive. Third, it is creative, and the use of abbreviations, emoticons, and novel ways of expressing oneself through short messages is quite impressive.

As an old fogey, I can't get the hang of it. I probably, on average, send about two or three text messages a month. And I am maybe the only person in the world who uses standard spelling and full sentence grammar when I text. But then nobody has ever accused me being modern and keeping up with the times!

As a linguist, I celebrate the playful creativity of texting, even if I don't seem to be able to participate in it too well myself.

Banyak Mixing

Mixing between English and Malay is the norm in informal language in Brunei. As an example, see this sentence from Tiger Lim's blog, talking about a shop selling rims for the wheels of cars even in the evening:

Wow their rims macam selling at pasar malam one... banyak lah!!!

Note the use of

• macam ('like') : is this influenced by like in English?
• pasar malam ('night market') : this is commonly used in English, so it might even be regarded as a word borrowed from Malay into the local variety of English
• banyak ('lots') : I wonder what triggers the use of a Malay word rather than an English equivalent, such as 'So many'.
• lah (the final discourse particle) : is it derived from Malay or Hokkien or both? Is it more common in the language of ethnically Chinese people (such as Tiger Lim), or is it equally common among Brunei Malays?

Note how many interesting linguistic questions can arise out of a single sentence.

kesalingbolehtukaran

I recently saw the word kesalingbolehtukaran ('interchangeability') in a newspaper article discussing the currencies of Brunei and Singapore. With 20 letters, it is the longest word of Malay I have ever come across.

It consists of the nominalising circumflex ke− + −an around a compound root with three parts: saling ('inter') + boleh ('can') + tukar ('exchange').

While two-part compounds are common in Malay, such as matahari ('sun') from mata ('eye') + hari ('day'), and kakitangan ('staff') from kaki ('foot') + tangan ('hand'), three-part compounds are not so common.

I wonder if there are any longer Malay words in common usage?

Brunei English or Bruneian English?

When discussing the English of places like Singapore and Brunei, we tend to say Singapore English and Brunei English.

In contrast, if we are talking about the English of places like Britain or Japan, we usually say British English and Japanese English.

Why do we use the nouns Singapore and Brunei but the adjectives British and Japanese? Why don't we say Britain English or Japan English? And why do Singaporean English and Bruneian English not sound quite right?

A posting on Language Log (here) suggests that we tend to use the adjective for countries but the noun for states; so we talk about the Canadian Parliament (it's a country) but the California Legislature (it's a state). This would seem to suggest that Singapore and Brunei are being treated as states rather than as countries. Well, maybe. But I suspect it might be more connected with size than status: Singapore and Brunei are rather smaller than Britain or Japan.

One other factor is that it seems increasingly common to refer to the France team and the Spain team rather than the French and Spanish teams, even though they are clearly both countries. Perhaps the use of the noun is winning out. So maybe use of the noun with Singapore English and Brunei English is a sign of modernity and not an indication of lack of respect.

Pigafetta's Wordlist

An early European visitor to Brunei was Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian scholar who travelled on Ferdinand Magellan's voyage around the world from 1519 to 1522, calling in at Brunei Town in 1521. Pigafetta kept a journal of the voyage, and this is an important historical document describing the situation in this part of the world at that time.

One of the things Pigafetta included in his journal was a list of 'some words of those heathen peoples of Molucca', and this wordlist is a valuable source of information about Malay at that time. However, it is rather stunning to find how many errors there are in the wordlist. For example:

• Land : Buchit (this is presumably bukit, which would be better translated as 'hill' rather than 'land')
• Morning : Patan Patan (one assumes 'patan' is really petang, i.e. 'evening', not 'morning')
• What is this man's name? : Apenamaito? (presumably this is actually apa nama itu, or 'what is its name')

(My thanks to my UBD colleague, Adrian Clynes, for showing me a copy of the journal.)

Vacation

When I record students in order to analyse their pronunciation, I always ask the question 'What did you do in your last vacation'.

Occasionally, some of them look perplexed. And I have realised it is because they hear the last word as vocation rather than vacation.

These two words would probably not be confused by most speakers in Brunei or Singapore, because they would have [eɪ] in the first syllable of vacation and [oʊ] in the first syllable of vocation. In contrast, the two words are homophones for me, as I have [ə] in the first syllable of both words.

This reminds me that my style of speech is not necessarily the clearest way of speaking. And I should remember to avoid vowel reduction in some circumstances. In fact, having [eɪ] in the first syllable of vacation is probably the most common way of pronouncing the word around the world, and I should remember to adopt this pronunciation.

I just checked in The Longman Pronuncation Dictionary (J. C. Wells, 2008, p. 868). It seems that use of [eɪ] in the first syllable of vacation is preferred by 61% of people in Britain, and it is only older speakers (like me) who have [ə]. So even in Britain, I am in the minority. We all have lots to learn in improving the clarity of our pronunciation.

BAJ

Brunei is going through the BA? series for vehicle registrations, and it is interesting to note which combinations are skipped.

BAD was omitted, so we went straight from BAC to BAE.

And we have recently found that BAI is also omitted, so we went from BAH to BAJ.

The reason for this is presumably because bai means 'pig' in Brunei Malay, and nobody would buy a car with its registration number reading 'pig'.

One can try and speculate which further sequences will be skipped ― but I can't think of any likely candidates at present.

The Streisand Effect in Brunei

The Streisand Effect is the situation when attempts to stop something being circulated are counterproductive, as the attempts themselves serve to publicise the matter widely. (It originates from the time when Barbara Streisand took legal action to trying and prevent people from circulating pictures of her beachfront property, but as a direct result of her action, many millions of people viewed the offending pictures.)

On Thursday, 18 October, the Prime Minister's Office in Brunei put out an announcement that we should not believe the rumours being circulated about His Majesty the Sultan (see here). Now, everyone is trying to work out what those rumours are, and there are some pretty bizarre stories flying around. Of course, I don't believe any of them!

partner

When I was younger, we used to talk about boyfriends and girlfriends. Instead, young people nowadays seem to talk about their partners. Which is splendid, except for one thing: a listener can't be sure of the sex of the partner.

This struck me a couple of days ago when a young woman told me: "My partner comes from Greece."

Now, I could, of course, have made the assumption that her partner was male; but you never know in today's world. And it would seem to be a potentially embarassing situation if I asked, "What does he do?" only to find out later that the 'he' was actually a 'she'. As a result, I did not pursue the topic, and instead I asked her about something else.

It seems such a pity that English has adopted this gender-neutral word partner without allowing a gender-neutral pronoun. Perhaps I could have asked, "What do they do?" – but that doesn't sound right at all.

This is one instance when I would have preferred the gender-neutral Malay pronoun dia ('he'/'she'). It is interesting that, in mixing languages, many local people insert English pronouns such as I and you in their Malay utterances, and one reason seems to be because it means they don't need to choose between the formal saya and the informal aku first person pronoun. But for third person pronouns, Malay has the more general usage while English forces us to make a gender choice.

It's a pity I can't get away with using dia when sepaking English!

Crash Blossom

A 'crash blossom' is a headline which is hard to parse because of the syntax. (For the origin of the term, see Wikipedia.)

I just saw a crash blossom on the BBC World site of 3 October 2012:

Initially, it seems that the Nigerian government, for some reason, is planning to attack a town that is subjected to a curfew.

Actually, 'Nigeria attack town' is a complex noun-phrase, referring to a town in Nigeria that has recently been attacked. And now (the report tells us) that town has been placed under a curfew.

I wonder whether headline writers ever think carefully about what they write. Perhaps they deliberately make their headlines obscure in order to tempt us to read more.

First Day at School

Last week, I was briefly in the UK, and by good fortune, it was the first day at school for my grandson, Oliver. Here he is coming out from school at the end of the day, carrying a book to be read at home.

When he got home, we asked him all about his day. It is quite stunning for me to hear him speaking long, complex sentences, at the age of 4 years and 8 months, when it seems just a short while ago that he was uttering his first isolated words. One of the things he said was:

I don't know the other teachers' names. Maybe they'll tell me tomorrow.

More on blends

In my previous post, I discussed blends in Malay such as cerpen ('short story') and tadika ('kindergarten'), and I raised the question why Malay tends to take the first part of each word while English prefers to use the start of one word and the end of another (e.g. smog = smoke+fog).

My UBD colleague Adrian Clynes suggests this is because the penultimate syllable is most prominent in Malay, especially when the words are spoken in isolation. (Whether there is lexical stress or not in Malay is debatable ‑ see the section on Stress in The Pronunciation of Malay.)

This suggestion seems to make sense, and it explains why TAman + DIdik + KAnak (with the most prominent syllable shown in upper case) gives rise to tadika. It does not work so well for ceRIta + PENdek giving rise toe cerpen; but it is basically true that most Malay root words are bisyllabic, so it is usual for the first syllable to be most prominent.

Another question is whether this extends to English blends that are used in this region. And, indeed, we find Mindef (Ministry of Defence) and TelBru (Telecom of Brunei).

What about in other varieties of English? Do we find any examples of the use of the first part of successive words in new words created in the UK or USA? I am not sure ‑ I can't think of any at the moment.

blends

In my introductory linguistics course this week, I mentioned blends such as smog (= smoke + fog) and motel (= motor + hotel), where a new word is created by adding the first part of one word to the second part of another; and I suggested that a Malay equivalent is cerpen ('short story'), which is a blend of cerita ('story') + pendek ('short').

My students suggested two more: tadika ('kindergarten') from taman ('garden') + didik ('education') + kanak ('child'); and pawagam from panggung ('theatre') + wayang gambar ('film').

It looks like Malay blends are formed by taking the first half of successive words, rathen than the first half and the second half. I'm not sure why this pattern is different from that of English.

until now

Suppose I said the following:

I have always been happy until now.

Do you think I am still happy?

In my variety of English, this would mean that things have changed, and now I am no longer happy; but my guess is that most people in Brunei and Singapore would feel that the state of happiness continues into the present time, so I am still happy.

This variant meaning of until now has the potential to create lots of misunderstandings. When we don't know a word, then there is not too much of a problem. But when we think we know what something means and it actually means something else, that is much more problematic.

Vowel Harmony

In my previous post, I discussed the pronunciation of the vowel in the second syllable of tasik ('lake'), specifically that it may be pronounced as [i] or [e]. In a similar fashion, the vowel at the end of terima kasih ('thank you') can often be heard as [e].

However it is not true that all vowels in the final syllable of words in Malay can vary in this way. For example, the second vowel in boleh ('can') is [e] and cannot be [i], and similarly the second vowel in oleh ('by') must be [e] and cannot be [i]. Why is this?

The rule is this: if the vowel in the first syllable is [e] or [o], then the second syllable cannot have a more close vowel. This is known as vowel harmony: the vowels in successive syllables of a word may influence each other. However, the vowel in the first syllable of both tasik and kasih is [a], so these words are not subject to this rule of vowel harmony.

For more information on vowel harmony and other aspects of Malay phonology, see my Pronunciation of Malay website, which provides an on-line version of my paper on Malay, written together with my UBD colleague, Adrian Clynes.

tasik/tasek

These two signs are at different places along the Tasik Lama to Markucing forest trail. Note the variable spelling of tasik ('lake'): on the left, it has an 'i', while on the right it has an 'e'.

This is rather similar to the variable spelling in the name Abin/Aben that I discussed earlier (here). And it similarly involves variability in the vowel in the final syllable, as the vowel /i/ in a closed final syllable can be pronounced as [e] in Malay.

cheese

I saw this cartoon on page 24 of The Brunei Times of 5 August 2012:

Clearly, the photographer doesn't know any phonetics. The reason we say cheese is because the vowel in it is /i:/, which is a close front unrounded vowel. When people say cheese, their lips are spread as if they are smiling.

In contrast, the first syllable of gouda has /u:/, which is a close back rounded vowel. If you take a photo while someone is saying that, their lips will be protruded, as if they are pouting. No wonder the man in the cartoon isn't having much success in getting a good photo!

The other advantage of saying cheese is that it starts and ends with non-labial consonants. (They are produced in the mouth rather than at the lips.) In contrast, parmigiano isn't so good because both /p/ and the /m/ are produced at the lips, so if you clicked at that moment, in the resulting photo it would look like the person was spitting.

Widows

In my previous post, I discussed the difference between anak yatim and orphan. My UBD colleague, Adrian Clynes, suggested a similar issue: my dictionary tells me that the Malay word balu is equivalent to the English widow, but in fact, that is not quite right, as balu can be used to refer to someone who is divorced, but in English widow never refers to a divorcee.

We can describe this difference in linguistic terms: balu has a broader meaning than widow. In other words, a cross-linguistic comparison suggests that balu is a superordinate term, while English has the two hyponyms, widow and divorcee.

Similar superordinate/hyponym comparisons between Malay and English show that Malay has the superordinate term tikus, while English has the hyponyms mouse and rat; and for the reverse pattern, English has the superordinate term rice while Malay has the hyponyms nasi, beras, and padi.