Tom Pepinsky

Category: Language

  • Malaysian Food Vocabulary Smackdown Watch, Brinjal Edition

    One of the benefits of having maintained a blog for 8½ years is that people end up looking at your old posts for all sorts of random reasons. For example, in the past 24 hours, people have found this blog by searching for

    • char kway tiauw
    • tom pepinsky causation
    • volkstellingen java
    • south vietnam what it could have been
    • roti canai using wheat flour recipe

    and dozens of other weird search strings. Every month or so I get an angry comment about how we wrote something outlandish six years ago. Which leads us to today’s Malaysian food vocabulary correction.

    Let’s go back to 2005—when I was still a graduate student, JMP was JM, our two kids were negative 4 and negative 7 years old, George W. Bush was early in his second term, etc.—to our post on the etymology of eggplant. We wrote that

    The local Austronesian word, terung, is kept in Indonesia, but has died out in Malaysia.

    However, a helpful Malaysian today commented that

    No it hasn’t

    Hmm. I just checked our Malay-language recipe books, Masakan Favorit Nyonya and Aneka Kerabu dan Sambal. The former has a recipe for Terung Masak Santan (eggplant with coconut milk), and the latter for Kerabu Terung (mixed veg [or however you’d translate kerabu] eggplant). If you google “kerabu brinjal” there are a couple of hits, but they are basically English-language pages. There are no results for “brinjal masak santan.”

    It is clear that the Malaysian commenter is right. We stand corrected. Brinjal is one of words used for eggplant in Malaysian English. Terung is the Malay word, just like in Indonesia.

  • The Sinosphere and Southeast Asia

    On Language Log, an interesting discussion about what the term “Sinosphere” means. Southeast Asia figures prominently here, of course, but not in a way which conveys any confidence that the contributors know anything at all about the region. For example, silly snippets like “I was Singapore there was widespread evidence of Chinese characters on store fronts (I presume it’s the same in the Philippines and Indonesia).” Right, good luck with that. I was recently in Freiburg and heard a lot of English (I presume it’s the same in Albania).

    But what really catches my attention is the comment attributed to Matt Anderson: “I refer to the Chinese and Indian areas of linguistic / cultural influence in Southeast Asia as the ‘Sinosphere’ and the ‘Indosphere’.” A bunch of related discussion follows.

    This view is common. It is of course true that the languages in the region took their syllabaries from Indic or Chinese origins, and that religions and state forms and things came through such channels too. But Sinosphere and Indosphere are commonly used to mean something much more than that. Among Western scholars, it reflects the belief that Southeast Asia is somehow a diminished or reduced thing, which can only be understood in relation to the Great Nations of China and India that have High Cultures and Important Traditions. Among Chinese and Indians, it reflects something of a global ambition for a modern sphere of influence which is somehow rooted in historical fact.

    Bah, I say. I will talk about Southeast Asia as part of the Sinosphere or the Indosphere as soon as we start talking about China and India as part of the Mongolsphere, and I am being absolutely serious.