Language I

I have this rather irrational fear of people thinking that I look down on the Malay Language. Sure, I find the vulgar words extremely... well, vulgar. I mean, for me, Fuck is not so vulgar compared to Puki and Pantat and even the quasi-rude Cipet. They sound horrendous, don't you agree? I for one can't use them even when I'm angry. Unlike Fuck.



But I digress. I speak very bad proper Malay. I write very bad Malay. Hell, in my SPM the lowest mark I got was Malay. I did not grow up in a Malay speaking environment. Before you give me all the pah! and tearing of clothes with disgust at my statement, I would like to inform you that my parents encouraged us to speak English from a very early stage. We grew up with Peter and Jane. And they'd buy us gifts if we speak good English. True, they don't speak English all the time. Hell, not even most of the time. They speak Kelantanese or Kelantanese English.

Again, with the hair-pulling and cloth-tearing: STOP! Kelantanese have very different grammatical structure compared to Malay.



For instance, in Malay, you would say, "Pagi tadi, semasa di dalam perjalanan ke sekolah, saya ternampak kemalangan jalan raya di antara dua kereta."
Now, in Kelantanese, that would be, "Pagi ni kawe dok jale gi skoloh, tibo-tibo gedegung! Keto bi eng langga pghotong. Huh, habeh punoh pghotong loh. Hok tue dio tu pulok..."

That is without all the inflections. Inflections and sound effect and elaboration of the subject is very important in Kelantanese.

If you simply say, "Pagi ni, tengah kawe dok jale gi skoloh, kawe napok keto langga keto.", a Kelantanese would nod and though, he would register what you said, it would take massive willpower and effort to continue the conversation.

Ok, so I grew up in a Kelantanese-English+English environment. Until this day, whenever I go to a friend's place and hear him speak in BM to his family, I suppress the laughter. Especially Johor BM. Yes, Nurlin, if you read this, I have to tell you, hearing you use Kamu with your brother is extremely funny to me.



So, let's examine my forte instead, eh? I speak horrible English. This was confirmed to me by Barry in Darjah 6 and now it's even worse. Russian, Malay and Kelantanese influence screw up my speaking English.

My writing English, on the other hand, I would be modest to say that I'm just above average and hell, let me be modest here. Russian still mess up with my English but I rather think that I do less careless mistake in writing English than most non-native speakers. That being said, you could, of course, understand why was I so pissed when my UiTM English teacher told me I speak good English. No? Well, let me tell you the story:

I was in UiTM for two months before I started studying in Russia. So, we had a class of English 101 in UiTM. It was the first day of the English class. The sun was shining, the birds were singing. I was in a fairly good mood. I loved English classes in high school. Not so much because of the teacher. The teacher was ok for your average high school English teacher but she used to teach Geography, for goodness sake. And me and few of my friends were better at the language than her. That's not an exaggeration. No, I looked forward to English classes for the Essay-writing part of the programme. We would let our imagination go wild with every story. Ah, those were the days.

So where was I? Oh yes, the English 101. So, for the first day of class we had to do a pop quiz. Fair enough, I thought. You have to test our mastery of English, don't you? So, I look at the questions and was baffled. I had to fill in the blanks with 'is', 'are' or 'am'. I thought of telling the teacher there must be some mistake but being quite the nerd that I was and am, I just did what I was told. Surely, it's for formality sake, right?

Naturally, I scored a hundred for that 20-questions paper. And the teacher came to me to congratulate me. With her heavily accented but grammatically perfect English, she commended me for my command of the language with unveiled surprise in her face. You understand why was I offended? She was SURPRISED that I knew how to put 'is', 'are' and 'am' at their respectful places. IS AM ARE. IS ARE AM!

I never went for another English 101 class after that.

I strayed far from the main purpose of this blog. I wanted to tell you how important English is for certain professionals: Lawyers, Politicians, Doctors, Lecturers and so on. But this entry has been going on for so long without any relevant pictures, I'm gonna save that for another day.

Toodles.

P.S. - The pictures are all artworks of the very talented Yaro42 and I don't do them justice by not showing them in their full-size glory. Head on to his gallery if you're interested.