BEING your average Malaysian, I take pride that I am multi-lingual.
Like anyone else who grew up studying at public schools, I speak relatively fluent Bahasa Malaysia. And, despite my reputation as a “banana” (white on the inside, yellow on the outside), I can speak basic Cantonese.
But I am most comfortable speaking English, considering it is my first language — the lingua franca of choice at my home.
Needless to say, growing up, I was always proud of the fact that I had a relatively good command of the English language. In fact, there was a point in my life where I even thought I spoke better English than the British.
After all, I often spotted mistakes in letters sent to me from Maria Freeman, my childhood penpal from England. Most notably was her use of words like “their” and “your” when she actually meant “they’re” and “you’re” respectively.
At that time, too, it was not hard to feel a little superior to some of my classmates. After all, the biggest joke in school was the time that Puan Zamrudah, my former English teacher, tried to get some students to pronounce certain words that she wrote on the board.
Among the classics were:
1. Lingerie (They would pronounce it “ling-ge-ry”)
2. Mosque (“Mos-queue”)
3. Rendezvous (“Ran-des-vas”)
Okay, so the last word isn’t exactly English, but you get the idea and I’m sure this incident wasn’t exclusive to my class.
You can imagine the surprise when I got my results for the English 1119 O-Levels paper I sat together with my SPM and I didn’t get the ‘A’ I was expecting. Mostly, I was disappointed.
Since then, however, I’ve learnt to be more in control of my arrogance. I also have to admit to occasionally poking fun at those who not only have a poor grasp of English, but whose accents make their English even more difficult to understand.
Then again, everyone swoons when they hear a beauty queen speak in broken English at a Miss Universe pageant, for example, or when Rafael Nadal takes to the microphone when he wins a game of tennis. So maybe my arrogance is misplaced. I think they call it “exotic”.
Accents aside, I do have a general wish that people in general — and Malaysians in particular — could speak better English. Like it or not, English is the major language of the world. While we are seeing slight changes with China’s rise as a superpower making Mandarin more and more common, it will be quite a few years, I think, before anything overtakes English.
There is progress in getting Internet URLs to recognise different languages at the moment, but English will still remain the dominant digital language for the moment if only because of the headstart it has had.
Just look at the acronyms — or SMS language as many people refer it to — that are starting to become everyday terms: LOL (laugh out loud), OMG (oh, my God), BRB (be right back). However, shortcuts like these do exist in other languages.
My favourite Mandarin one is “881” which means “Bye Bye” from the sound of the Chinese pronunciation “Ba Ba Yi” (repeat it many times really fast and you’ll hear it)!
I don’t know many other languages well but from where I stand, I think English dominates.
Of course, I only got to thinking about all this because of an email thread between my parents, my second sister ee che, who is currently living in Australia, and myself a few days ago.
We were discussing presents (or more specifically, who owed who a certain amount of money from sharing gifts) when my dad signed off his calculations with a simple “Q.E.D”.
It is an acronym for the Latin saying, quod erat demonstrandum which means “that is demonstrated” or “that is proved”.
Dad said his using of the acronym “was a throwback to those days when national schools were ‘government schools’ and one was bound to have a Mr Simon, Mr Bromley or Mr Atkinson as one’s maths teacher.”
Apparently, when teaching algebra, these teachers liked to add Q.E.D. at the end of their “workings” when solving an equation.
I guess it’s not just the younger generation of today who are so fond of making up acronyms because, dad continues, “since we could not pronounce the Latin words, some wise guy said the phrase meant Quite Easily Done.”
News words are created and added to the vocabulary all the time, and if we don’t make an effort to improve on our language skills, we will always be playing catch-up.
In response to us scratching our heads over the use of QED, dad joked, “See lah, don’t want to teach Science and Maths in English, all these problems will crop up.”
That last sentence really does sum it all up, I guess, pun truly intended.
Niki blogs at www.nikicheong.com/blog and Twitters at www.twitter.com/nikicheong
