In his own words: English for trade; mother tongue to preserve identity

This speech in its entirety, made in support of a revised, more flexible Chinese-language curriculum while he was Minister Mentor, is one of the most complete statements of Mr Lee Kuan Yew's views on bilingualism and language policy.

MAR 30, 2016 (Updated)

NOV 24, 2004

Don't play, play - Singlish is studied around the globe

FEB 5, 2017


From Italy to Japan, at least seven universities have conducted classes on it over past decade

Yuen Sin

Blogger Wendy Cheng's Web video series Xiaxue's Guide To Life and Jack Neo's Ah Boys To Men film franchise are well-known shows among Singaporeans. For one thing, they are filled with colloquial terms, local references and copious doses of Singlish terms such as "lah" and "lor".

But they are not merely for entertainment. In recent years, such shows have found a place in universities around the world, where linguists draw on dialogues used in these local productions to introduce to undergraduates and postgraduate students how Singlish has become a unique variety of the English language.

This comes even as concerns have been raised over how Singlish could impede the use of standard English here.

From Italy and Germany to Japan, at least seven universities around the world have used Singlish as a case study in linguistics courses over the past decade. This is on top of more than 40 academics outside of Singapore - some of whom were previously based here - who have written books or papers on Singlish as part of their research.

Corporate guff scales new heights

LUCY KELLAWAY
TODAY ONLINE
JANUARY 11, 2017

Every January for the past decade, I have handed out awards for the horrible use of language in business. Usually, the task amuses me. This year, I have found the sheer weight of euphemism, grammatical infelicity, disingenuity and downright ugliness so lowering, I have decided to start the 2016 Golden Flannel Awards with something more uplifting: A prize for clarity.

I am calling this the Wan Long prize, after the Chinese meat magnate who once uttered the clearest sentence ever spoken by a CEO: “What I do is kill pigs and sell meat.”

Mr Wan will surely approve of my winner, a BNSF railway executive who told a conference: “We move stuff from one place to another.”

This elegant, informative and borderline beautiful sentence is a reminder that despite the horrific nature of the following entries, clarity remains attainable.

Singlish: Friend or foe?

Sumiko Tan
Deputy Editor

JUN 5, 2016,

I don't think we should celebrate Singlish, but there's no escaping how it identifies and brings Singaporeans closer together
I've not seen my sister for nearly four years, which is why I'm looking forward to the next two weeks.

We have planned a family holiday in Edinburgh and London.

She, her husband and two children will be flying in to Heathrow Airport from the United States to meet my mother, H and me. H's daughter from Wales will also be joining us.

We've booked two Airbnb houses with kitchens, so I'm packing some Singapore goodies that we can cook and eat there.

I've bought Prima Taste Singapore Curry mix and will be getting Bengawan Solo pineapple tarts, Ya Kun kaya, Bee Cheng Hiang bak kwa and Spring Home frozen roti prata.

There's nothing like the taste of Singapore to bond two Singaporean sisters, right?

Actually, it's more likely going to be the sound of Singapore - Singlish - that does it.

Let's get off the 'euphemism treadmill'

Justin Lee
For The Straits Times

June 10 2016

There is no need to whitewash someone's disability to show them respect

We no longer have cripples, the mentally retarded or old people in Singapore. It is not because we found some scientific solution or elixir of youth, but that the preferred terms have become "the physically disabled", "intellectually challenged" and "senior citizens", respectively.

Our polite intentions have resulted in name changes for voluntary welfare organisations that serve people with disabilities - the Singapore Association for Retarded Children became the Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore (Minds); the Spastic Children's Association of Singapore became Cerebral Palsy Alliance Singapore (CPAS); and the Society for Aid to the Paralysed became The Society for the Physically Disabled, which more recently became simply "SPD" because they now serve people with other, and not just physical, disabilities.

These politically correct terms and phrases were developed to avoid the stigmatisation and discrimination of people with disabilities. But we now have a situation of what Harvard University linguist Steven Pinker calls the "euphemism treadmill" - where words originally intended to be politically correct take on the negative connotations of the original words and new terms have to be invented to be less offensive.

'I find Singaporeans a cynical lot': Grandmother of Goondus Sylvia Toh

"People no longer believe. Their first stance is combative. Like 'Oh, they're giving us S$10. Tomorrow, they will tax us S$11.' That is the first thing they think instead of thinking: 'I think I'll go and spend S$9,'" columnist and writer Sylvia Toh Paik Choo tells 938LIVE’s Bharati Jagdish.

By Bharati Jagdish, 938LIVE 

13 Feb 2016 

SINGAPORE: Columnist and writer Sylvia Toh Paik Choo is known as the Guru of Singlish. She is the author of Eh Goondu! (1982) and Lagi Goondu! (1986), the first two books on Singlish, and is the first to put spelling and punctuation to Singlish. She continues writing on a freelance basis, writing about food, movies and, of course, her brand of humorous social commentary. 

Kickstarting the interview with 938LIVE's On The Record, Ms Toh talked about her own educational history and how she came to be called "the Grandmother of Goondus" in Singapore.

The great Hong Kong versus Singapore debate: China Daily

Nov 9, 2015

Asia's financial centers offer distinct advantages, but decades-old competition is not going away.
By Thomas Zhang

China Daily/Asia News Network



In the midst of the global financial crisis in 2009, investment banks in London were shedding thousands of jobs.

A Chinese friend of mine in the United Kingdom fell victim to the cuts and was considering a move back to Asia.

"Where do you think I should go?" he asked. "Singapore or Hong Kong?"

As someone who had spent a lot of his professional life in the UK, I was of little help.

Both are prominent regional financial centers and were being touted as a refuge for bankers looking for opportunities away from Western markets during the financial crisis.

This is a dilemma facing every banker who wants to work and settle in Asia. If you are a banker in North America, you probably wouldn't hesitate too much where to work before heading to New York, and London still has the biggest draw among financial centers in Europe.

But in Asia, Singapore or Hong Kong is a less obvious choice, because these two de facto financial centres in Asia (ex-Japan) have long been competing to be the preeminent financial hub in the region.

After moving to Singapore a little less than a year ago, I realised that the appeal of these two cities largely depends on your personal status.

The best is yet to be - or is it?

Dec 28, 2014

The challenge Singapore is facing now, at this stage of its development, is bigger than China's

By Rachel Chang In Beijing


It was a surprise twist to a familiar conversation.

Over lunch with a Chinese acquaintance a few months ago, we cycled meanderingly though the usual topics educated Beijingers like to cover: air pollution, politics, the social graces of the population, or the lack thereof.

I forwarded my theory that the air pollution problem in Beijing would improve faster than expected, as such is the nature of governance systems with few other stakeholders. Things get done quickly, and Beijing has shown there is little economic, political, social or human cost it considers too high for a priority of the central government's.

He was sceptical, and argued that the lack of private profit opportunities would slow down change. But then, concluding amiably, he said: "Only one thing is for sure. Life will get better."

It was a cap not just to our discussion on air pollution, but to everything else we had covered and more - a succinct existential statement that conjured less of an empirical truth than a spiritual one.

It is - I have come to believe over 10 intense months of reporting in China - a statement of national significance, summing up a collective mood of buoyancy and resurgence.

My lunch partner's attitude is so crystallising not because he is as far from a victim of Beijing's propaganda and information control as can be found among locals, which he is.

It is because he is a middle-class, middle-aged man. And for four years as a political reporter in Singapore before my Beijing stint, I had never come across a middle-class, middle-aged Singaporean man expressing anything akin to optimism, not to mention the earnest, uninflected belief that "life will get better".

Freedom of speech under siege in West

Jun 24, 2011
 
By Robert Skidelsky

RECENTLY, at a literary festival in Britain, I found myself on a panel discussing free speech. For liberals, free speech is a key index of freedom. Democracies stand for free speech; dictatorships suppress it.

When we in the West look outward, this remains our view. We condemn governments that silence, imprison and even kill writers and journalists.

Reporters Sans Frontieres keeps a list: 24 journalists have been killed, and 148 imprisoned, just this year. Part of the promise we see in the 'Arab Spring' is the liberation of the media from the dictator's grasp.

Yet freedom of speech in the West is under strain. Traditionally, British law imposed two main limitations on the 'right to free speech'. The first prohibited the use of words or expressions likely to disrupt public order; the second was the law against libel. There are good grounds for both - to preserve the peace, and to protect individuals' reputations from lies. Most free societies accept such limits as reasonable.

But the law has recently become more restrictive. 'Incitement to religious and racial hatred' and 'incitement to hatred on the basis of sexual orientation' are now illegal in most European countries, independent of any threat to public order. The law has shifted from proscribing language likely to cause violence to prohibiting language intended to give offence.

A blatant example of this is the law against Holocaust denial. To deny or minimise the Holocaust is a crime in 15 European countries and Israel. It may be argued that the Holocaust was a crime so uniquely abhorrent as to qualify as a special case. But special cases have a habit of multiplying.

France has made it illegal to deny any 'internationally recognised crimes against humanity'. Whereas in Muslim countries it is illegal to call the Armenian massacres of 1915-1917 'genocide', in some Western countries it is illegal to say that they were not. Some East European countries specifically prohibit the denial of communist 'genocides'.

The censorship of memory, which we once fondly imagined to be the mark of dictatorship, is now a major growth industry in the 'free' West. Indeed, official censorship is only the tip of an iceberg of cultural censorship. A public person must be on constant guard against causing offence, whether intentionally or not.

[Hence our instinctive response of absurdity to politically correctness.]

Breaking the cultural code damages a person's reputation, and perhaps one's career. Britain's Home Secretary Kenneth Clarke recently had to apologise for saying that some rapes were less serious than others, implying the need for legal discrimination. The parade of gaffes and subsequent grovelling apologies has become a regular feature of public life.

In his classic essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill defended free speech on the grounds that free inquiry was necessary to advance knowledge. Restrictions on certain areas of historical inquiry are based on the opposite premise: The truth is known, and it is impious to question it. This is absurd; every historian knows that there is no such thing as final historical truth.

It is not the task of history to defend public order or morals, but to establish what happened. Legally protected history ensures that historians will play safe. To be sure, living by Mill's principle often requires protecting the rights of unsavoury characters. Mr David Irving writes mendacious history, but his prosecution and imprisonment in Austria for 'Holocaust denial' would have horrified Mill.

By contrast, the pressure for 'political correctness' rests on the argument that the truth is unknowable. Statements about the human condition are essentially matters of opinion. Because a statement of opinion by some individuals is almost certain to offend others, and since such statements make no contribution to the discovery of truth, their degree of offensiveness becomes the sole criterion for judging their admissibility. Hence the taboo on certain words, phrases and arguments that imply that certain individuals, groups or practices are superior or inferior, normal or abnormal; hence the search for ever more neutral ways to label social phenomena, thereby draining language of its vigour and interest.

A classic example is the way that 'family' has replaced 'marriage' in public discourse, with the implication that all 'lifestyles' are equally valuable, despite the fact that most people persist in wanting to get married. It has become taboo to describe homosexuality as a 'perversion', though this was precisely the word used in the 1960s by the radical philosopher Herbert Marcuse (who was praising homosexuality as an expression of dissent). In today's atmosphere of what Marcuse would call 'repressive tolerance', such language would be considered 'stigmatising'.

The sociological imperative behind the spread of 'political correctness' is the fact that we no longer live in patriarchal, hierarchical, mono-cultural societies, which exhibit general, if unreflective, agreement on basic values. The pathetic efforts to inculcate a common sense of 'Britishness' or 'Dutchness' in multicultural societies, however well-intentioned, attest to the breakdown of a common identity.

Public language has thus become the common currency of cultural exchange, and everyone is on notice to mind one's manners. The result is a multiplication of weasel words that chill political and moral debate, and that create a widening gap between public language and what many ordinary people think.

The defence of free speech is made no easier by the abuses of the popular press. We need free media to expose abuses of power. But investigative journalism becomes discredited when it is suborned to 'expose' the private lives of the famous when no issue of public interest is involved. Entertaining gossip has mutated into an assault on privacy, with newspapers claiming that any attempt to keep them out of people's bedrooms is an assault on free speech.

You know that a doctrine is in trouble when not even those claiming to defend it understand what it means. By that standard, the classic doctrine of free speech is in crisis. We had better sort it out quickly - legally, morally and culturally - if we are to retain a proper sense of what it means to live in a free society.

The writer is a member of the British House of Lords and professor emeritus of political economy at Warwick University.

I swear, it's not the worst you could say

A letter to the NTU valedictorian who used the F-word in her speech
By Rohit Brijnath

DEAR Miss Trinetta Chong,

Good morning and may I gently say that now you have really *&^% done it. A single swear word - uttered I appreciate in youthful excitement - in your valedictorian speech at Nanyang Technological University, and a crisis has arisen.

Mine, not yours.

Apparently, I qualified to write this essay because it is rumoured I swear fluently in four languages - English, Hindi, Bengali and Australian. Please, it's untrue. My mother - famous for her bars of soap - may read this.

Nevertheless, there you are, swearing on YouTube and smiling, watched by thousands; here I am, alone, swearing at my computer. Of course, yours was a public space, mine is private, but, alas, those lines tend to blur these days.

This is no old fogey lecture, just a look at a word that centuries on still provokes debate.

Anyway, should I get overly preachy, I will be slandered as uncool; should I dismiss profanity by quoting Stephen Fry, who said 'It is impossible to imagine going through life without swearing or without enjoying swearing', I will be rightly pilloried for encouraging it. So I must, like the Flying Wallendas, attempt a dangerous high-wire walk.

Not everyone swears, though what the size of this finely restrained tribe is I cannot say. Even those who do, will say - please wait for stern parental voice - 'there is a time and place for everything'.

Indeed. Nevertheless, profanity intrigues many, especially when young. When we meet a travelling Dane or Kenyan, the first words we often like to learn are 'hello' and 'thank you', followed by something rather rude. Weird, isn't it?

Anyway, your minor outburst has required a little soul-searching and much Internet browsing. So, in case you were unaware, the F-word arrived, so notes the Oxford Dictionary of English, in the early 16th century and it has never left. One may insert ear plugs, but one cannot be deaf to it, for it can even be transmitted through sign language.

Its letters have since been rearranged to become a clothing company and its significance has warranted a 93-minute documentary. One might say this word has gone the distance, even in fact into space: Having completed his moonwalk in 1972, and unaware of an open mike, commander John Young, tired of eating citrus fruits, made his complaint rather plain.

Invective, I concede Miss Chong, litters our public landscape like a sort of verbal graffiti. So much for offering you role models. Former United States vice-president Dick Cheney has uttered it and that terrific dame, Helen Mirren, has shared it. At least she had the courtesy to put her hand to her face in smiling dismay.

Comedians toss the word around like confetti, movies use it for emphasis - Martin Scorsese's Mafia-epic Casino reportedly has 398 mentions - and rock stars hurl it with defiance. Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters recently instructed a fighting fan to 'Get the *&^% out of my show'. Presumably, the F-word was the better option to fisticuffs.

Sports stars, viewed as heroic even by adults, use it flagrantly. Or as the ice-hockey player Gordon Howe once explained it: 'American professional athletes are bilingual: They speak English and profanity.' Of course, them we excuse under the guise of 'heat of the moment'.

Not all words stand the passage of time, for language - a lovely, evolving beast - alters subtly every generation. New lingos arrive, and my daughter - like you, I am certain - uses SMS code which I strive to comprehend. LOL, it took me a while to figure out, had no relation to lollipops. Please try not to smirk. But the F-word, for all its casual usage, has not entirely lost its jarring anti-establishment edge nor its strong sense of taboo.

Beyond disgust, profanity offends some - like a writer friend of mine - because it further impoverishes language, manifesting a wider refusal to discover within English, for instance, more beautiful and available synonyms. So invective becomes the lazy option and too many words, once frowned upon, creep into the public discourse.

Now even in Australia - where swearing I had suspected was a fundamental right - Victoria's state government is trying to zip lips with an on-the-spot fine for indecent language. Whereupon author Keith Dunstan wrote: 'What do you do when you hit your thumb with a hammer? What do you say when you serve three double faults in a row?'

The F-word will continue to polarise.

It will remain a vulgarity and provocation to many; it will be viewed as a way to convey anger pithily, contempt pointedly and elation swiftly for others. But its quick death is unlikely, for it is inextricably linked to emotion and rebellion.

I hardly recommend it, Trinetta, but as speech goes, there is more in life that offends me. It rests way below race-baiting, it does not outrage like sexism does, it is not as disturbing as religious hatred. All this can be spoken of in fine language, but elicits a sharper disgust. Personal attacks on television, in blogs, even in letters I receive, are to me far worse than a quickly bleeped-out word.

So here is my last word on the F-word for you. It's a personal, adult choice, but a choice to be exercised smartly, a distinction to be made as to which space is appropriate for it.

And by the way - it isn't what I remember most about your speech. That would be your quoting of Dr Seuss. I swear, I love that old genius.

Good luck,

Rohit Brijnath

[Nice. For all the people who thought it was a big deal, I humbly disagree. She was not expressing anger, or disdain, or sought to offend. It was a sincere exuberant outburst, with no offence intended. None should be taken. And if you are the type to take offence, you should just pretend you didn't hear it.]

Was Chinese wrongly taught for 30 years?

Nov 27, 2009

A fresh controversy over second language policy has erupted with Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's remarks that the Government had proceeded on the wrong assumptions for 30 years. Did it really go wrong? If so, how can it be rectified? Insight traces the twists and turns of a policy that has led to much weeping and gnashing of teeth among students, parents and teachers.

By Clarissa Oon & Kor Kian Beng

Is Hokkien my 'mother tongue'?

Sep 23, 2009

By Alfian Sa'at

A LONG time ago, a Chinese man saw some Malays eating a fruit. It had a spiky shell, but its insides were filled with large seeds covered by yellow, buttery flesh. He had never seen (nor smelt!) a fruit like it in his native village in Fujian. What was the fruit called, he asked the Malays.

'Durian,' they replied - from the Malay word duri, meaning 'thorn'. And so the Chinese man went back and told his friends about this new fruit. As the word spread, it became incorporated into Hokkien as loo lian.

Then one day, a new fruit made its appearance, native to South America. It was also green, with a spiky exterior. It was known as 'soursop' in English.

The Malays had a tendency to append the word belanda (meaning 'Dutch') to anything foreign that they had never seen before. Examples include kambing belanda (sheep), ayam belanda (turkey), kucing belanda (rabbit). So they called soursop durian belanda.

The Hokkiens, on the other hand, called it ang mo loo lian. Ang mo - roughly 'Western' - was also used for other edibles, like ang mo kio (tomato) and ang mo chai thou (carrot). The word ang mo loo lian carries traces of Hokkien's contact with both Malay and the West.

The study of loan words has always fascinated me, for they give clues to the kinds of social interactions that occurred in the past. I sketched a scenario above of how a single word from one language entered another. But the process is much more complex than that, probably involving long-term, sustained contact. The chain of transmission might even involve an intermediary, such as the Straits Chinese (or Peranakans), whose Baba patois contains both Malay and Hokkien words.

Here are some words that were borrowed from Hokkien into Malay: beca (trishaw), bihun (vermicelli), cat (paint), cincai (any old how), gua (I/me), guli (marbles), kentang (potato), kamceng (close), kuih (cake), kongsi (share), kuaci (melon seeds), teko (teapot), taugeh (bean sprout), tahu (beancurd) and tauke (boss). (Note that 'c' in Malay has the 'ch' sound.)

This linguistic exchange was a two-way process. Here are some Malay words that penetrated Hokkien: agak (guess or moderate), botak (bald), champur (mix), gadoh (fight), gaji (wages), jamban (toilet), kachiau (disturb), otang (owe/ debt), pakat (conspire), pasar (market), pitchia (break), salah (wrong), senget (crooked), sukak (like), tiam (quiet) and torlong (help).

There are even some Cantonese words that are now part of Malay parlance, such as pokai (broke or penniless) and samseng (gangster). Interestingly, it has been postulated that the word sam seng (three stars) was derived from the fact that recruits in the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army wore caps emblazoned with three stars, each representing one of the main races in Malaya: Malays, Chinese and Indians.

In the Singapore Armed Forces, one of the things all NSmen were told by their sergeants was that 'over here, Hokkien is your mother tongue'. This was based on the stereotypes that Hokkien was a gendered, macho language, with the most pungent swear words.

But considering how Hokkien words have entered the Malay language, I have realised that there is a larger truth to that statement. It is like tracing a family tree and then discovering that I had a Hokkien great-great-great-greatgrandmother. As a matter of fact, since almost two-thirds of the Malay lexicon consist of borrowings, I definitely had Arabic and Indian (linguistic) ancestors too.

Malays have a saying: bahasa jiwa bangsa, 'language is the soul of a race'. But there is a tension in the phrase. We tend to think of 'race' as something bounded and rigid. But 'language' does not have such impermeable borders. Words of various origins pass through open checkpoints, undergo shifts in meaning, and become naturalised over time.

Thus, as much as we may like to be essentialist about our race, we cannot escape from the hybridities already extant in our language. There is humility in the idea that no language is perfect on its own, and will borrow words to make up for its lack.

My Hokkien friends who travel overseas would often relate to me the sense of dislocation they feel when speaking to other Hokkien speakers. A friend who went to Taiwan, for example, was surprised to note that they did not understand what loti meant. Another friend shared a story about the nuances of pokai in Hong Kong.

At the end of the month, he moaned out loud at the office kam chi pokai le ('I'm broke this time') and all eyes turned on him. Pokai means 'broke' in Singapore. But in Hong Kong, pokai (literally, 'cast out on the streets') suggests something worse, like being destitute on the streets or being beaten up.

It is easy to interpret these instances as evidence that the Chinese in this part of the world have been 'contaminated' by other cultures. I happen to take the opposite view: The Nanyang Chinese have evolved an identity of their own, incorporating elements of other cultures. That this has been possible is a testament to their openness and curiosity.

Much ink (and tears) has been spilled on how the promotion of Mandarin here has resulted in what some have called the 'cultural lobotomy' of the Chinese community. In many ways, I sympathise with the late Kuo Pao Kun's observation that Chinese Singaporeans are 'cultural orphans', snatched as they were from their biological southern Chinese bosoms and placed in the laps of Mandarin-speaking foster mothers.

A familiar lament is that the declining use of the southern Chinese languages has resulted in the estrangement between generations of Chinese Singaporeans. I would argue that it has also led to some estrangement among the various languages. I do not know if I should worry about the fact that the traffic of loan words has almost ceased between Malay and Mandarin.

It is premature to theorise that this is a symptom of less interaction among the races. After all, there is English to mediate our communications with one another. But the fact remains that I do not know of a single Malay word that has Mandarin origins.

Somehow, our forefathers, of various races, knew how to pakat against common enemies, were able to kongsi their resources, and in the process of all that champur, became kamcheng with one another. The product of their alliances, friendships and inter-marriages is reflected in the languages we have inherited.

To lose this legacy is to sever a vital connection not only to the historical origins of the Nanyang Chinese, but also to Singapore's dynamic multicultural past.

The writer is a poet and playwright. He thanks Lai Chee Kien for his inputs. A longer version of this essay first appeared in The Online Citizen.