Despite my MALAY name....

Something interesting to share. Because sharing is caring :)

The STAR, Wednesday January 25, 2012

Don’t let English die

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I’M a 73-year-old Englishman, despite my Malay name, and from time to time I like to read the items in Mind Our English. Although I consider I speak my language correctly, I’m happy to brush up on grammatical points that I may have forgotten in a city like Sungai Petani, Kedah, where English isn’t too common.

I’m old-fashioned apparently in the way I spell (and pronounce) words as people in my part of the world used to spell them. I still spell words like “to-day” and “to-night” although the hyphen seems to have vanished these days. I still use “whom” now and feel that it’ll disappear from the English language very soon. I still use “lie” when asking a child to lie down, the objective (or accusative) case of a personal pronoun after a preposition and the subjunctive mood correctly.

I remember months ago writing to someone in your area who stated she was a teacher and I said that I hoped that English wasn’t one of her classes as she wrote something like: “A friend told my husband and I (something).” In other words, “A friend told I.” It’s a common mistake even amongst native English speakers. It reminds me of a comical song from Somerset in England called: Don’t tell I, tell (h)e.

Now to MOE (Dec 12, 2010). A reader asked about using “were” instead of “was” and the answer was a good explanation of the subjunctive mood affecting the verb “to be”. Great. However, elsewhere in the column, the teacher wrote: “If there was no inversion ...” Whoops! Sorry for being a smarty pants! I’m not trying to be clever. I enjoy reading MOE.

How’s this for English? When I was working with the Royal Air Force at Butterworth, a senior storeman came to me with a parcel saying: “Excuse me Cpl Zainol, this parcel has just arrived from Australia but I do not know for whom it is.” It made me think.

Keep up the good work and don’t use words like “wanna” and “gonna”. Where on earth did they come from? 

By : Zainol Abdullah