Tom Pepinsky

Category: Language

  • Funny spellings

    A long time ago we posted about the funny ways that they spell English loanwords here.  We’ve noticed a couple more, and we’ve included them before.

    empayar The British had one, and Malaysia was a part of it.
    falasafah Plato or Aristotle.
    kartrij Toner comes in this.
    seksyen A part of something.
    wayar If you have wireless, you don’t need this to connect to the internet.

    We’ll keep our eyes out for more.  Currently we’re having a tough time trying to get our “Malay chops” back.  As we’ve noted before, we developed a Jakartinese slang when we lived in Indonesia that is actually quite noticeable to locals in both Indonesia and Malaysia.  We use vocab words that Malays never use, such as mengerti for “to understand” instead of faham.  We use Indonesian pronunciations of words rather than Malay ones, saying saya as SIGH-yah, instead of SIGH-yuh.  We use little particles like nggak for “not” instead of tak.  Many sentences in Malay are almost totally different than they would be in Indonesian.  The classic example is “you can speak bahasa?”

    Yu boleh cakap Melayu? (Malay)
    Anda bisa berbahasa Indonesia? (Indonesian)

    At any rate, we’re trying our very hardest to get back into the Malay swing of things.  It’s not easy, and unfortunately, since we’re not going to be here very long, by the time we’re all set we’ll have to get used to another accent: Australian.

  • Time, Food, Language

    The worst thing about flying across the world is how much your body fights it.  The other night we slept from 7 until 7, which was great.  Last night we slept from 9 until 4:15 AM, by which time we were fully awake.  So we flipped on the TV and caught the end of the Italy-Ukraine game, and then tried to go back to sleep; didn’t work.  The other problem here is that it really doesn’t get light out until 7:30 AM, which just messes with you.  So we’ve been up already for about six hours, and it’s not even lunch time yet.  We’ll have to really try hard to stay up late enough tonight…we have a date to watch the England-Portugal match at 9:00 this evening.

    Food here is still good.  We went to our favorite bread place last night and had idli (sourdough steamed rice buns), masala dosai (fried bread wrapped around potato curry), paper dosai (fried bread just served with curry, and roti telur (pulled flaky wheat bread with egg).  Yum.  We’ve been having long discussions this morning about where to go for dinner tonight: it’s a fight between our favorite Chinese fast food and our favorite Chinese hawker stalls.

    Last night we had a fun cab ride with a Malay guy who lamented how the Chinese and Indians never want to speak Malay.  We had forgotten the delicate dance of languages here.  Most everyone speaks some sort of Malay and English, but Malay people love it if you try to speak Malay.  Chinese and Indian Malaysians prefer English to Malay, and you can look like a fool if you try to speak Malay to them–they probably can respond, but they’d prefer not to.  Of course, if we spoke Cantonese/Hokkien or Tamil we’d do better, but we definitely cannot.  Just another part of the constant barrage of race, ethnicity, religion, and "multiculturalism" that is part of every aspect of life here in Malaysia.