Mix Tongues?

Janadas Devan – on words

PUBLIC discourse in Singapore, conducted usually in English, has been studded of late with Chinese and Malay expressions. Consider these examples from the past months.

NTUC secretary-general Lim Swee Say, in arguing why companies should be required to the reveal the age profiles of their workforce, said: This way, even if the “CEO sumpah (‘swears’ in Malay) ‘I never discriminate against the older workers’, he will have to explain himself.”

Dr Amy Khor, chairman of the government feedback unit Reach, when speaking in Parliament of the CPF changes, reported that some people feared the changes would leave them with “bo chi, bo kang (‘no money, no job’ in Hokkien)”.

A grassroots leader at a dialogue session, who felt that elderly Singaporeans should be given access to their CPF savings early so they can “have a good time at the IR”, asked Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong what would be the use of having money when one is old and bo gei (“without teeth”).

Mr Lee replied: “If they win (at the IR) they will tan tio (‘benefit’). If they lose, their children will take care of them. If they have no children, the Government is there. Bao jia (‘definitely win’).”

But that would be disastrous for the country as a whole, Mr Lee warned – “bao si (‘sure die’).”

He added “Bo gei you cannot enjoy, but bo gei, bo lui (‘no teeth, no money’) is worse.”

The longevity insurance, the Prime Minister went on to tell his audience, is a winner – “bao ying (‘sure win’)”. “If you look at obituary pages… you read, mo mo gao ling jiu shi (“So-and-so is 90’ in Mandarin). So many 90-years-olds… and some over 100.”

Mr Lee speak three languages – English, Mandarin and Malay – fluently and some Russians too. But I do not recall him mixing it up – code-switching, as it were, between tongues – to the extent that he did at this dialogue. What is going on?

Well, obviously, Singapore’s leaders have discovered that breaking occasionally into Chinese or Malay, even when they are speaking primarily in English, can be rhetorically effective. The examples above also indicate a more relaxed attitude on their part towards Chinese dialects.

According to the General Household Survey, one in five Chinese Singaporeans habitually speaks a Chinese dialect other than Mandarin at home. For this reason, Manpower Minister Ng Eng Hen urged MPs recently to “spew forth with passion your Hokkien lyrics and poetic metaphors” when speaking to their constituents about the CPF changes. It is doubtful if poetic metaphors, in any language, can ever be persuasive on financial matters, but it is significant that Dr Ng mentioned Hokkien, not Mandarin.

We have certainly come a long way since the early days of the “Speak Mandarin” campaign. As my colleague Peh Shing Huei noted recently, there was a time when ‘even simple dialect phrasers in locally produced Mandarin drama serials were scrubbed out”. Yam seng, for instance, the traditional toast, was in the early 1980s replaced on television with “the politically correct Mandarin phrase, gan bei”. That may not qualify as “a kind of linguistic genocide”, as Mr Peh quoted the film-maker Tan Pin Pin as saying, but it would certainly qualify as an authentic case of asinine inauthenticity.

Singaporeans do speak a variety of languages. Almost all of us are bilingual, if not trilingual, to some extent or another. Even people like me who communicate primarily English, do occasionally break into Malay or Hokkien or Tamil – to clinch a point of contact with our interlocutors. That is how we habitually cakap-cakap among themselves. This newspaper always provides English translations of even the simplest Chinese or Malay expressions it cites – even cakap-cakap, amazingly enough, even bo lui – but most us above 50 years old don’t need them.

This facility of ours for bi-,or tri-lingual citations is I think wonderful. It is boring to be always speaking in only one tongue. There are Malay expressions that convey thoughts English cannot. There are Chinese and Indian sayings that encapsulate insights unavailable in English. Since we are bilingual, there is no reason why we should not occasionally slip into our English speech and writing the odd phrase or two from one of the other languages we know. The variety achieved thus would be pleasing; the variations would lend our communications a certain multidimensional quality.

As a matter of fact, English writers have been doing this for centuries, sprinkling their writings with quotations from both ancient and modern languages.

“Five words sum up every biography” Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor”, I read the other day in an essay by Aldous Huxley. “I see the better way and approve; but I follow the worse way”. The English translation conveys accurately enough the same thought, but it lacks the precision of the Latin original.

“What is she really like? It is hard to judge beneath the joie de vivre.” How often have we not read sentences like that? Joie de vivre is usually translated as “joy of living”, but the English version lacks the panache, that certain je ne sais quoi – other French phrases with no exact equivalents in English – of the original.

“Looking into the heart of light, the silence./ Oed’ und leer das Meer.” That comes from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The German line, a quotation from Wagner’s Tristan, means simply “Desolate and empty the sea”. So why couldn’t Eliot have written just that? Well, read the lines again and it would be clear their affect and sound turn crucially on the German intrusion.

All this is quite different from bo gei, bo lui, admittedly, but only in degree, not in kind. If magazine writers can routinely invoke someone’s joie de vivre, there is no reason why Mr Lim cannot utter the odd sumpah. If British and American writers can break occasionally into Latin or German to achieve particular effects, there is no reason why Singaporean writers cannot break occasionally into Mandarin – or Sanskrit or Arabic even – to achieve similar effects.
Mixing it up in this way would be far preferable to mixing it up in Singlish. This maintains of the integrity of the different languages; Singlish doesn’t.

“Bo gei you cannot enjoy, but bo gei, bo lui is worse” – that remains a grammatical English sentence despite the Hokkien intrusions. “Ah Pek no teeth, siong. Ah Pek no teeth and bo lui, worse one” – that is Singlish, a grammarless confusion of English and Hokkien.

Faham, tak?