Simi, the Singaporean version of Siri

More Siri stuff. But since I'm in Singapore, I thought I'd blog about a clip from the mrbrown show that's been making the rounds among Singaporeans (and fans of Singlish). By the way, simi is Hokkien for 'what?' The uploader of this particular video on Youtube was also kind enough to provide a transcript of the dialogue:

I found the clip hilarious and thought I should make some comments on the language used, for the sake of my non-Singaporean linguist friends. I'm certainly no expert on Singlish (having done any personal research on the subject), but I will say that Simi's speech corresponds to a 'basilect' form of Singaporean English, which is what most people would call 'Singlish', as spoken by an ah beng 'an unsophicated Chinese boy, usually Hokkien' (as defined by TalkingCock.com).

You can find the ubiquitous sentence-final particles, including the (in)famous lah, but also other particles like ar, leh, one, what and the question particle meh. The Wikipedia article on Singlish provides a neat summary of the various particles found in Singlish, though I think they need to provide a bit more contextual evidence especially since the use of most particles is governed by context and pragmatics.

I myself should pay more attention to the use of particles in Singlish (and more standard varieties of English for that matter), as they often help me analyse particles used in languages I study. In addition to the particular context that the particle occurs in, there's usually an emotional connection with its use that's difficult to define. Speakers will often say things like a sentence / utterance 'sounds better' with a particular particle, or that the presence of a particle makes the speaker sound either more or less 'angry' or 'surprised' or 'timid' etc.

Some other grammatical features characteristic of Singlish: copular verbs (e.g. 'to be' and its forms 'is', 'are', 'am') are typically dropped before adjectives, e.g. Migrate better lah!; The CTE jam from Ang Mo Kio to Orchard Road (my intuitions tell me that jam here isn't being used as a verb). Plurality isn't usually marked on nouns with a suffix but with a quantifier like so many, e.g. got so many Bangla and PRC come and take your job and make your MRT so crowded.

You also find a few 'typically Singlish' words / expressions used, like tahan 'to endure' (from Malay) and atas 'snobbish' (lit. 'upstairs') (from Malay), as well as sibei jialat (from Hokkien) - sibei 'very' and jialat 'f*cked' (okay not quite, it literally means 'to eat strength' in Hokkien - maybe kinda like Mandarin 吃苦 'to bear hardship', lit. 'to eat bitterness').

One expression I wasn't familiar with was: why you fly my aeroplane? I had to look up the TalkingCock.com entry to learn that it means 'why are you standing me up?'. To fly aeroplane also corresponds to the Hokkien pang puay kee? but the origin of this phrase is indeterminate.

(The transcriber wasn't able to / didn't want to make out the name of the restaurant at 3:13 in the video. It's actually called the 'Ku De Ta Restaurant', located at on the roof of the new Marina Bay Sands hotel - or 'Coup d'état Restaurant', another not-so-subtle hint of subversion by the awesome mrbrown show.) 

Ringgit

Months ago I commented on how BBC reporters refer to the Chinese currency, the yuan /juɛn/ 元, as the /juan/ 'you-ahn', rhyming with 'one'. And this is despite the fact that they employ people trained in phonetics to research these things. The trend might be due to the fact that other people have started calling it the 'you-ahn', but it's not like a historic standard like saying 'Paris' with the final 's'. So what's the point then of hiring people to check these things anymore?

Today, I just saw another report on the BBC about inflation in Malaysia. The reporter pronounced the name of the national currency, the ringgit, as the /rɪŋɪt/ 'ring-it', without the voiced velar stop /g/. For people who are familiar with Malay and Indonesian, if the word was meant to be pronounced that way, it would be written 'ringit'. The velar nasal is written using the digraph 'ng', while the following velar stop is written with an additional 'g'. So, the currency really is the /rɪŋgɪt/ 'ring-git'.

I don't mind if news programmes completely anglicise the pronunciation of foreign names and currencies, but the BBC hires people to verify how to pronounce these names as close as possible to the source language.

Kathmandu!

Arrived safely in Kathmandu yesterday. Singapore seems a world away. Except that all the tourist-oriented cafes look like they belong in Singapore, with prices to match. My friend Lauren came to pick me up from the airport with the guy from the guest house we're staying at. It's always nice to see a familiar face upon arrival.

I've start Nepali lessons tomorrow. I've booked in for about 15 hours of lessons starting tomorrow, with plenty of opportunity to practise out of class. I'm also meeting a speaker of Kagate (that Lauren introduced me to online) later in the week to talk about some dictionary making. I thinking I'll use a program called WeSay, but more on that later this week.

At the moment, my Nepali is really basic, but knowing some Hindi helps, and I can read Devanagari alright, albeit very slowly. My main problem now is that because I spent the last few days on Bintan (an Indonesian island just 1 hour away from Singapore), my brain keeps going to the little Malay / Indonesian it knows. Incidentally, Malay has historically borrowed many words of Sanskrit origin which are cognate with Nepali words e.g. bahasa 'language', so sometimes it helps, although the two languages are still grammatical worlds apart.

For non-Singaporeans, I also explained over breakfast that the name 'Singapore' itself has roots in Sanskrit (via Malay) - singa 'lion' and pura 'city / town'.