The Malaysian language is a fun one to learn and it has lots of elements that in my opinion should be adopted in the west as well. First of all, the grammar is incredibly simple. Perhaps this is just my simplified understanding of the language and everything is merely simple because I only have a simple understanding of the complexities of this language.

Supposedly English is taught in the schools here starting at age seven, this does not seem to be the case with the people I work with. Either they did not go to school, did not pay attention, or the country schools here in the logging areas are low on content. Actually I work mostly with Indonesians who likely didn't have the same education as the more prosperous Malaysians. They provide Malaysia with very cheap labor, they receive barely more than a few dollars a day.

Back to the language. First, there are no tenses for the future or the past, it is all implied in conversation. Yesterday I eat, today I eat, tomorrow I eat, now I eat, etc. The form also doesn't change if you are talking about someone else: she eat. Then you can often omit who you are talking about as it is also inferred in the conversation. You can pose a question by merely changing the intonation. "want eat" can mean "I want to eat", "Do you want to eat?", "Tomorrow I will want to eat", "Did you want to eat yesterday?", all depending upon the context and the intonation. You can also use intonation to indicate distance. "Over theeeeeere" is a bit further than "over there".

English has developed complex rules of grammar to leave no doubt as to who is doing what. It makes speaking complex, but dumbs it down for the listener. No preposition, proverb or adverb can be omitted, everything is very clear, no matter what the context. Malaysian makes speaking very easy, but requires the listener to pay close attention to the whos, whats, and whens as they are not always mentioned, they are inferred. I can imagine that this would make poetry quite interesting. Is he talking about himself, is it me, is it humanity? Who the subject is is still open to interpretation. As my malaysian still is very poor, after every conversation I usually just understand that someone did something at some point in time, which doesn't really help, but I can reply, usually something like "hmmmm, me no understand. Want eat?"

To pluralize, you just repeat the word: Orang - person, orang-orang - people. The word for termite is anai-anai, I haven't figured out yet if the word for termites is anai-anai-anai-anai or if it is a word like sheep, where plural and singular is the same. Perhaps they simply realize that termites never come alone.

It is also fun to see all the modern words adopted by Malaysians: Teksi - Taxi, Bas stesen - Bus Station, etc. This makes things somewhat easy as it has a big british influence. Neighboring Indonesia was colonized by the dutch, so many of their modern words are dutch based. I don't think the dutch were very liked over here, the word for the Proboscis monkey is Dutchman and they are quite funny looking. The word orang-utan means man of the forest. Malaysians have recognized the relationship between man and ape a long time ago, while many in the west still debate the common history we share with our hairy cousins. But that's another story...

No comments yet

Your comment:

Name:
E-mail/HTTP:
Remember Me