How the pretentious filch English to sex up their Malay
THE most revealing pop culture obsession in Malaysia now is English, the global language we persevere to read, write and speak. Only a minority, mostly Anglophiles raised in an English curriculum environment and born before the 1970s, and children stewed in middle class indulgence, have a grasp of the language's technical, artistic and aesthetic facility.
By Azmi Anshar
The rest will roil in pidginspeak — Manglish, Singlish or "Mongrelish" — to get by in the aggressive business climate of marketing and advertising every day goods and services. Not to be mistaken for accent, which can be charming, this patois is glibly described as "communications" English, infested with mispronunciations, horror syntax, bizarre grammar and daft application commingling robustly.
When globally, people are scrambling to learn English, shrewd Malaysians learn their English the pop culture way, mostly through Hollywood movies and TV series, pop/rock stars' idiosyncrasies and the West's prodigious literature.
The non-savvy ones stagger through school and tuition, strangely score As in examinations but string sentences by patching words memorised from a dictionary.
It seems that politicians and educationists can't consensually agree on how English should be formally instructed.
The English taught in schools has produced infinitesimal writers, speakers and practitioners while its edification in universities and colleges cow under the domineering force of the politically correct.
All that is left is pop culture so pervasive that you'd think that English was a first language, not a language of mass neglect.
Here's the paradox: English was lofted to national obsession when Malay-based TV stations and Malay newspapers, magazines, periodicals, even websites and blogs began (mis) appropriating English words, terms, mindset and philosophy into their communicative artillery. Hear that loud slurping noise: it's the Malay media, or to be more precise, the Malay intelligentsia, sucking English into the Malay realm.
An exaggeration, you think? No need to go far: most Malay media publications have liberally "adapted" scores if not hundreds of English nouns and verbs.
Try this for conservative size: "chief" is now "cif", "trophy" is "trofi", and "appreciation" is "apresiasi".
National television has no scruples pounding on us that "information" is "informasi" while that favourite buzzword "vision" is a languid "visi". "Prestige" is suddenly "prestij" and "finalis", well, "final". Malay words coined, created and disseminated in a whim.
That hot-blooded guerilla writer Salleh Ben Joned was agitated that a so-called Malay intellectual tried to coin the word "peliriat", a vulgar-sounding facsimile of "playwright". The relief that the coinage failed to get traction must have been stupendous to Salleh.
It is now possible to construct a near-perfect Malay sentence composed mainly of misappropriated English nouns and verbs.
However, the farcical irony of these transgressions is that each misappropriated word has a perfectly functional and practical Malay equivalent.
Stealing English words and patching them into the Malay language has been enthusiastically abetted by the Malay media, its practitioners dither over their command of writing and speaking English while shamelessly dispersing glaring English-esque words and themes in their publications. A new phrase or word could have been arbitrarily coined this very instant.
Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, the guardian of Malay language's inviolability, is as guilty as the language's corruptors. As we understand it, before an English word is embraced, an equivalent has to be found in the Malay lexicon of every regional dialect. If that fails, look to Mandarin, Cantonese or Hokkien, and if that too fails, follow up with Tamil, and if that fails, search the languages of the indigenous and go as far as Sabah and Sarawak.
If all attempts fail, only then would the English word finally be admitted.
Such admirable stringency has failed though to impress the Malay intelligentsia looking for a quick fix. That said, there is still sanity in the coinage. Thank goodness National Service is Khidmat Negara, and not Servis Nasional!
Yet, languages, even the Malay language, must evolve to adapt to contemporary demands but at the rate the words are misappropriated, the national language has not evolved, it has mutated into a Frankenstein-like beast, riddled all over with linguistic sores and lesions.
So why the lust to anglicise the Malay language? At its core, pretentiousness to sex up their Malay. And at the heart of the militant member of the Malay intelligentsia is the delusion to be a proletarian of cool and sophistication, except for the hassle it takes to learn English's methodology. Pop culture leanings are a convenient short cut.
Then there's their simmering outrage that views learning of English as a "yellow culture" profanity, a mob contempt that regards such learning as subservience to the last frontier of Western colonialism.
Ask the objectors to the teaching of Maths and Science in English, which is straddled at a confusing crossroads.
The government wants competent English proficiency to meet global competition but the one-dimensional objectors whinged that this method was pursued at the expense of the Malay language's sanctity, a contradiction in terms when these militants are the same pretentious dolts whose written Malay is leached with filched English words.
While they inflict themselves with cultural schizophrenia, the militants will tolerate English, just as long there is a Malay rendering. At the rate English is crudely bud-grafted into Bahasa Melayu, Malaysians will one day be enlightened that they don't need to learn English to write and speak it. All they need is to be able to understand Bahasa Melayu in all its anglicised disfigurement.
