Orphans

My UBD colleague, Malai Ayla, asked me this question: what is the English for the Malay term anak yatim? My dictionary shows this:

However, this is not quite right, as anak yatim can mean a child who has lost one parent, while the English word 'orphan' refers to a child who has lost both parents (anak yatim piatu in Malay). This can lead to mistranslations, as in the caption to the following picture from page 8 of the Borneo Bulletin of 25 September 2007:

So, back to the original question: what is the English for anak yatim? I think the answer is that there is no simple translation, and you need a phrase such as 'a child who has lost one parent'.

Memory

I am currently in the UK, playing with my two grandchildren, Oliver aged 4 and Elsie aged 2. I only see them once a year, so each time I see them, they have developed so much. This time, it was stunning to see how well Oliver can remember things.

We were playing a memory game. The idea is that there are twelve cards, as below. One person looks away, and then the other person turns one of the cards over, to show a slightly altered picture. The first person then looks back to see if they can spot the difference. Here is the original:

You should focus on the picture above to see if you can remember it before looking at the modified picture.

Below is the changed one. Can you spot the difference without referring back to the original? Can you remember what was in the original picture?

The answer: the third card in the middle row has a green and yellow animal missing.

What I found interesting was that Oliver could spot the difference immediately even though he didn't seem to be concentrating very carefully. (In fact, he was jumping around all over the place.) In contrast, I had to focus very hard to try and remember the pattern.

This illustrates how much children are able to absorb with apparently little effort, while older people like me struggle to remember things.

Malay English Intonation

Yesterday I attended the viva examination for Noor Fadhilah Mat Nayan at the University of Reading. Her thesis is on the intonation of English as it is spoken in Malaysia, based on recordings of ten female speakers engaged in the "map task". Her findings are that models of intonation based on British English, specifically the model known as Discourse Intonation proposed by David Brazil, may not be suitable for the description of Malay English, partly because there is a distinct tone (which she calls a Cooperative Rise) which is common in Malaysia but does not occur in British English. This tone is quite distinct from the fall-rise of British English, and its role seems to be to present information in a less demanding fashion than with the ordinary rising tone.

She also found that nucleus placement can be quite variable, and shifts in the main intonational accent of a phrase do not have the same role as similar shifts in British English.

These findings are important in the continuing efforts to describe varieties of English around the world, and I very much hope she will publish them in top journals, to enable other researchersthem to access them easily.

It was a privilege to be able to contribute a little bit to this work. Reading a thesis can sometimes be hard work; but in this case, it was well written, the research design was sound, and the data analysis was careful and thorough.

My wife complains that I almost never stop working, even when I am on vacation (as I am at the moment). But if you enjoy working on something like this, then is it really work?

ambush marketing underpants display

The pile-up of nouns in newspaper headlines is notorious. But I find this sub-headline from today's on-line Guardian article about the behaviour of the Danish footballer, Nicklas Bendtner, particularly tough to decipher:

Irish bookmaker behind Danish striker's ambush marketing underpants display to pay his £80,000 fine

Apparently, ambush marketing is an established noun phrase; but you probably need to know that the Bendtner showed his underpants after scoring a goal during a recent match at the European Nations Cup in order to understand the headline.

For more on the story, see here.

Speed of Light

This post has nothing to do with Brunei. But it's something I thought was interesting, so never mind.

I just saw this paragraph in an article on the BBC Word Service written by Vint Cerf (here) celebrating the life and achievements of Alan Turing:

My colleagues and I have had to re-think the basic communication paradigms for large scale networking owing to the slow nature of light speed propagation (eg 20 minutes one way from Earth to Mars) and disruption caused by planetary motion.

Slow speed of light? Isn't the speed of light the fastest thing we know?

My goodness, we are living in exciting times when we are starting to worry about the slow speed of light!

Abin / Aben

On the forest trail between Bukit Karamunting and Tasek Lama, there are two wasai ('waterfalls') named after two residents of Kampung Subok, Abin and Jumat. But the spelling of the first of these is uncertain. Look at the two signs just a few metres apart. On one, it is spelled Abin, and on the other, it is Aben.

This variability in the spelling might reflect two things:

First, Brunei Malay only has three vowels, /i, a, u/. So it is uncertain how to spell Brunei names when the letters 'e' and 'o' are also adopted from Standard Malay spelling.

Second, and perhaps equally important, in Malay /i/ and /e/ cannot be contrastive in the final syllable of a word, just like /u/ and /o/ cannot be. This is why kasih ('love') is often pronounced with [e] in the final syllable, especially in the phrase terima kasih ('thank you'; lit. 'received with love'). It is also why we sometimes see the spelling kampung ('village') and at other times we find kampong, and it is why the Malay word amuk ('crazy') is borrowed into English as amok (as in 'run amok').

rabun

The Malay for long-sighted is rabun dekat (lit. 'blind close') and for short-sighted it is rabun jauh (lit. 'blind far').

I wonder how much confusion this causes, given that the Malay word dekat ('near') is associated with what in English we call 'long-sighted' (or what Americans call 'near-sighted'), and the Malay word jauh ('distant') is associated with the English 'short-sighted'.

I imagine that dominant Malay speakers would find the English terms quite confusing, and similarly people who learn the English words first would be bemused by their Malay equivalents, especially since rabun doesn't seem to occur much outside of these two phrases. (The basic word for 'blind' in Malay seems to be buta, not rabun.)

My Malay-English dictionary glosses rabun as 'poor', which isn't very helpful. In contrast, the excellent on-line Pusat Rujukan Persuratan Melayu offers 'blind' as a translation, which is a bit better. Perhaps 'poor-sighted' or 'half-blind' might be the best gloss for rabun.

teh

I was just reading a BBC article about the financial situation in Europe (here), and there were two instances of teh (instead of the) in the short article:

April output fell 1.9% from teh previous month

Teh request would follow a conference call

I guess they don't use a spell checker!

Mind you, a spell checker can be a real nightmare if you try and type foreign languages. I tried to enter teh tarik ('tea poured from a height') the other day, but my computer changed it to the tarik. And I keep on getting caught out by datang ('come') getting changed to dating.

sort of / kind of

I was just reading that sort of is three times more common in British English than American English, while kind of is five times more common in American English.

So what about Brunei English? In my data of 53 five-minute recordings of UBD undergraduates, sort of occurs just four times, while kind of occurs 44 times. This seems to reflect a clear American influence on Brunei English.

One thing remains a mystery, though. We might expect rhotic speakers (those who have an [r] at the ind of four and car) to be more likely to use kind of than non-rhotic speakers, if we assume that rhoticity is also partly influenced by the American accent. But, in fact, 27 out of the 44 instances of kind of are produced by non-rhotic speakers. I find this hard to explain.

Zagreb

In my previous post, I discussed the spelling pronunciation in Malay of Budapest with [f] instead of [p] at the start of the final syllable.

Of course, we have lots of similar cases of overgeneralisation with the pronunciation of names in English. For example, why on earth do so many people pronounce Beijing with [ʒ] in the middle? In Chinese it has [dʒ], which is a perfectly good sound in English. So why not use it?

The rationale seems to be this: Beijing is an exotic place, so its pronunciation should sound exotic. And that is why so many people put the rare English sound [ʒ] rather than the commonplace [dʒ] in the middle.

Another example, pointed out by my UBD colleague Alistair Wood, is Zagreb, which some people (especially football commentators) pronounce with stress on the final syllable. In Croatian, and indeed all Slavic languages, the stress is on the first syllable, so speakers can never have heard a native speaker producing it with final stress. Furthermore, stress on the first syllable is the most natural way of saying it in English. But some people seem to think that, because it is an exotic place, the pronunciation must be a little bit unusual; and so they give it final stress

Budafest

The pronunciation of names in different languages is always interesting. The morning, on the 8:00 RTB radio news, I heard the announcer state that Prince Sufri, the President of the Brunei Olympic Committee, has gone to Budapest, but he pronounced it with [f] rather than the expected [p] at the start of the final syllable.

This is quite easy to explain: Malay has no [f], except in borrowed words such as faham ('understand') and fikir ('think') from Arabic and filem ('film') and fail ('file') from English. But it is common for people in Brunei (and elsewhere in the Malay-speaking world) to pronounce faham with an initial [p], in effect nativising the pronunciation. To avoid this, some speakers are very careful to make sure they pronounce the [f] correctly. And then occasionally they extend it, and they end up using [f] where in fact it is not expected. We call this "overgeneralisation".

European Champions!

For a lifelong Chelsea supporter such as me, last night was a bit special. It's not just that we finally won the thing; it was the way we won it.

For goodness sakes: Bayern had twenty corners, and they scored from none of them; but Chelsea had one single corner in the whole game, and Drogba went and scored from it. And then Bayern missed a penalty, they had so many chances with an open goal, there was a disallowed goal for off-side, and they were even up in the final penalty shoot out! ... what can you say?

At the end of the game, I called my son in England and just lay on the floor laughing. My wife says she hasn't heard me laugh so much for years.

From a linguistic perspective: I always find football commentary fascinating, and I feel sorry for English learners from around the world who are trying to make any sense of it. Just think about some of the things the commentators say — not all from last night, but pretty typical for football commentary:

• they're really under the cosh now
• Drogba was on his bike there
• Ribery is looking to pick up the bits and pieces
• Robben was lucky to get a second bite there

I really pity all those students of English who look up cosh in a dictionary and still have no clue what on earth is going on. I just looked it up in the Macmillan Dictionary, and it means "a weapon shaped like a short thick stick". Well, that helps!

And what is anyone doing on a bike while playing football? But that is the wonder of language — none of it really makes any sense. It's just what we say. Especially in football commentaries.

artly

This is the label my UBD colleague Adrian Clynes noticed on the back of his jacket.

Artly doesn't seem like a good word in English. But why not? If you can add ‑ly to the end of the noun saint to make saintly, or to the end of friend to create friendly, or to the end of father to make fatherly, why can't you add ‑ly to the end of the noun art to creat artly?

The answer seems to be that the only nouns to which you can add ‑ly to create an adjective must be human. So brotherly is fine, as are womanly and ghostly, but not *carpetly, *bookly, *catly or *horsely.

This is, of course, different from adjectives becoming adverbs: it seems you can add ‑ly to pretty much any adjective to create an adverb, so you have happily, slowly, lazily, dangerously, sleepily, cautiously, superciliously, artfully, etc.

But, in contrast, the ‑ly suffix that converts a noun to an adjective seems to be much more restricted.

Are there any exceptions? I guess worldly and lovely, and probably a few more. Also, there seem to be plenty of human nouns which don't allow a ‑ly suffix: *auntly, *bossly, *scientistly, and many more.

Subject-Verb Agreement

One feature of New Varieties of English, such as those of Singapore and Brunei, is sporadic lack of subject-verb agreement. A factor that sometimes influences this is an intervening noun. For example, in Singapore I found these examples from student assignments, where generation and speech respectively result in the verb having a third-person singular ‑s suffix:

The children in this generation uses this language.

I realise that the features of my speech is rather distinct and different.

And in my corpus of interviews in Brunei, I have found the following examples, in which English and competition seem to have influenced the main verb:

most of the words of English comes from well originate from Greek language

but those who actually go for the competition is quite less

Does this occur in the English from elsewhere, such as the UK?

I just noticed the following in this week's WorldWideWords newsletter, written by Michael Quinion, who is something of an expert on English:

In the days when knowledge of Greek and Latin were widespread, ...

Note the the head of the subject is knowledge, so we would expect the verb to be was not were. But the intervening 'Latin and Greek' seems to have caused confusion.

I wonder how widespread this phenomenon is.

this areas

Here is a sign at the entrance to the Belimbing Recreational Park along Jalan Subok.

It is a bit surprising that people can spend lots of money producing such a well-made sign but not bother to get the English right.

The analysis of this English raises some questions. Does areas have a spurious ‑s suffix? Or is it a case of confusion between this and these?

My feeling is that the former analysis is better: the intended message is supposed to refer to 'this recreational area', but the sign-writer used the plural areas instead. However, I have also come across this used with plural nouns. It seems that there is no clear distinction between this and these in Brunei, possibly because many speakers do not differentiate between long and short vowels.

Repetition in Malay and English

I have previously discussed lexical repetition, sometimes involving one term in English followed by the equivalent in Malay. Here is another example I heard from Dr Rais Yatim, the Malaysian Minster of Communications:

broadband atau jalur lebar (Astro Awani news, 23 April 2012)

where jalur lebar is the Malay for 'broadband'.

What about just in English? I have been going through editions of The Borneo Bulletin, and I found these:

Bruneians as culture custodians must not only play a key role to safeguard and preserve the country’s heritage but also ... (Borneo Bulletin, 24 October 2011, p. 8)

and

We are looking for investors for food processing in Brunei and this would be a good facilitator and enabler for the market. (Borneo Bulletin, 24 October 2011, p. 11.)

In the first of these, safeguard and preserve would appear to mean the same thing; and in the second, facilitator and enabler seem to be exact synonyms. My impression is that such repetition is rather common in Brunei English.

walkaton

The word walkaton ('walkathon') gets used quite often in Malay, as in this extract from page 2 of Media Permata of 23 April 2012:

Larian amal ini dibahagian kepada dua- larian 6.3 km, dan walkaton 4.2 km.

which might be translated as

This public run is divided into two: a 6.3 km run, and a 4.2 km walkathon.

It is interesting that the silent 'l' in walkaton is retained in the Malay word, but the 'th' becomes 't'. I'm not sure why this differential treatment of these letters occurs. One possibility is that the vowel in the first syllable is neither [o] nor [a] when it is pronounced in Malay, so neither 'o' nor 'a' would be suitable in spelling the word; but the consonant at the start of the final syllable is always pronounced as [t] so it is fine to spell it as 't'. One way or another, given that so many borrowed words with 'th' in the original have 't' in their Malay versions (terapi, teori, tema, ...), it is hardly surprising that local people tend to use a [t] when saying these words in English.

a(n) historical account

I recently wrote a book review in which I included the statement:

... provides an historical perspective on the promotion of English in India ...

and the editor changed 'an historical perspective' to 'a historical perspective'.

The reason for this editorial change is presumably because there is a consonant at the start of historical, so the editor feels that a rather than an should be used.

However, we should note that, in actual speech, initial /h/ is often omitted from function words such as his and her because they are generally unstressed. And the main stress in historical is on the second syllable, so the initial /h/ in the unstressed first syllable is actually usually omitted. This means that historical is in fact often spoken with an initial vowel, so it is best to use an rather than a before it.

In contrast, history has its main stress on the first syllable, so the /h/ is not omitted, and we say 'a history of Brunei'.

OK, so this is very, very picky, and I allowed the editor to change the usage if he wishes; but maybe it is of interest to think a little about the rationale for the use of an or a. Note that we say 'an hour' not *'a hour' because the initial /h/ in hour is silent. Note also that we say 'a university', not *'an university', because university actually begins with the consonant /j/.

Malay Doublets

In a previous post (here), I discussed doublets in Malay such as berhati-hati dan berwaspada ('careful and cautious'), where the two words mean essentially the same thing.

Perhaps the most common doublet of this kind is where one of the words is Malay and the other is English. For example, on page 2 of Media Permata of 14 April 2012, in quoting a member of the fire brigade who was discussing the reasons for the outbreak of a fire, we find the sentence:

Kabel sumbangan itu dipercayai terlibih bebanan atu overload.

which might be translated as

The extension cabel is believed to be too much load or overload.

In other words, terlibih beban and overload mean exactly the same thing, but one is Malay and the other is English. My assumption is that this is done because lots of people use the borrowed word overload even when speaking Malay, but the fire officer wanted to ensure that people who only speak Malay could also understand him.

This does not just happen in Brunei. On 15 April, I was listening to the news on Astro Awani (the Malaysian cable TV news channel), and I heard Dr Rais Yatim, the Malaysian Minister of Communications, mention 'facility atau kemudahan', when facility and kemudahan mean the same thing.

This raises a few questions: is the phenomenon equally common in Malaysia and Brunei? And is it more usual to put the Malay term first or second?

It is interesting that this type of doublet closely matches legal doublets found in English, such as 'aid and abet', 'goods and chattels', 'null and void', 'part and parcel' (see here), where the first word is Anglo-Saxon and the second is Latin or French; and the original rationale was to allow ordinary people in England to understand legal terminology. The only difference is that these English doublets have been in the language for centuries. Only time will tell whether the Malay doublets survive for as long.

Malay spelling

On the whole, Malay spelling is predictable: you can determine the spelling of a word from its pronunciation; and you can predict the pronunciation of a word from its spelling. But there are a few exceptions:

• the letter 'e' can be pronounced as [e] or as [ə], so [peraŋ] ('blond') and [pəraŋ] ('war') are both written as perang
• cukai ('tax') is two syllables while mulai ('begin') is three syllables, because the former is a single morpheme while the latter is mula+i
• universiti is usually pronounced with an initial [j] (because it is a borrowed word) while untuk ('for') never has an initial [j]
• borrowed words with 'g', such as alergi ('allergy') are pronounced by some people with [g] and by others with [dʒ]

Note that the last two involve words borrowed from English, and borrowings often cause irregularities in spelling. We might note that the English words carriage and marriage both end in [ɪdʒ] while massage and collage both end in [ɑ:ʒ] because they are more recent borrowings from French.

One more case of indeterminate spelling in Malay derived from borrowings from English involves words like zink ('zinc'), which is usually pronounced as [ziŋ]. In other words, you would not be able to tell from the pronunciation whether the word should be written as zing or as zink.

In fact, this gives rise to a potential minimal pair in Malay: bang ('a Muslim call to prayer') and bank ('bank') are both pronounced as [baŋ].