Wednesday September 1, 2004

Malay grammatical terms

By FADZILAH AMIN

I’M currently teaching at one of the rural schools in Perak, and would like to know what these are called in English:

Group A:

simpulan bahasa
peribahasa pepatah
bidalan
perumpamaan
penjodoh bilangan
perkataan berganda
nahu
kata nama
kata ganti nama diri
kata kerja transitif/tak transitif
kata adjektif
kata hubung
kata seru
kata tanya
kata pepatah
kata sendi nama
kata bilangan
kata arah
kata majmuk
subjek dan predikat

Group B:

What are these signs called in both Bahasa Malaysia and English? What are their functions? What is the group below called? Are there any other signs that you think people should know about?

~
!
@ ( is this called “alias” or “at”?)
#
^
*
{ }
[ ]
“”
‘’
:
;
/ (is this called “slash” or “oblique”?)

Rozana Salahudin, Perak

I’ll do my best to give you the English equivalents, but I’m not familiar with a few of your BM terms, so I’ve put question marks next to those. Perhaps some readers who are experts in current BM grammar can kindly supply those terms.

Group A

simpulan bahasa = idiom
peribahasa / pepatah / bidalan = proverb
perumpamaan = simile

penjodoh bilangan: English does not have this to indicate a single object, animal, or person: it just uses the indefinite articles ‘a’ or ‘an’. But it has different names for groups, especially of animals, e.g. “a flock of sheep”, “a herd of cattle”, “a gaggle of geese”, etc.

perkataan berganda = reduplication, which The Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a word-form produced by repetition of a syllable” and the One Look Dictionary Search site defines it as “a word formed by or containing a repeated syllable”.

nahu = grammar
kata nama = noun
kata ganti nama diri = personal pronoun
kata kerja transitif/tak transitif = transitive/ intransitive verb
kata adjektif = adjective
kata hubung = conjunction
kata seru = exclamation
kata tanya = question word (e.g. who, where, why)
kata pepatah?
kata sendi nama?
kata bilangan?
kata arah?
kata majmuk = compound word
subjek dan predikat = subject and predicate

Group B

Most of the signs are ‘punctuation marks’, but others are common symbols. I’ll just tell you what they’re called in English. Perhaps you can find out what their Malay equivalents are. I’ll try to tell you what other symbols mean if you ask me, but please don’t ask me to supply other symbols. I’m sure your pupils only need to know what they come across in the course of their lessons.

~ This symbol is used in mathematical formulae to mean “approximately equal to”. Before a date, it means “approximately”, e.g. “I came here ~ 1960.”

Above a letter, it is called a ‘tilde’ and is used in certain languages to indicate a slightly different sound from the sound of that letter, e.g. above an ‘n’ in Spanish, it indicates a ‘ny’ sound as in the Malay ‘nyamuk’.

! This is an exclamation mark. Don’t think I need to tell you where to use it!

@ Between two names, this is the symbol for ‘alias’ (or ‘also known as’), e.g. Majasa @ Mat Jasa. In an e-mail address, this means ‘at’ and is placed between the user ID and the domain name, e.g. Majasa@pc.jaring.my

# This is the symbol for a number and is often placed before a number of a flat/apartment. It can be used before other numbers when writing in note form, e.g. Son #1 instead of First son, etc.

^ This symbol is called a ‘caret’ when used between words in a piece of writing to indicate where something new or forgotten needs to be inserted.

* This symbol is called an ‘asterisk’ and is placed next to a word or phrase in a text to indicate that there is information about it at the bottom of the page, also preceded by an asterisk. Sometimes different kinds of information are distinguished from one another by using one, two and three asterisks respectively.

{ } These are called ‘curly brackets’ and is used mainly in computer programming.

[ ] These are called square brackets in British English. It is used to insert one’s own words within a quoted sentence or passage. For example, a celebrity may be quoted as saying, “The bard [Shakespeare] is my favourite author.” The word in square brackets tells the readers who is referred to as “the bard”, in case they don’t know.

“” These are called ‘double quotation marks’ and are used at the beginning and end of a quotation.

‘ ’ These are called ‘single quotation marks’. Styles of writing vary, and some styles favour the use of single quotation marks at the beginning and end of a quotation. These marks can also be used to highlight certain words or phrases as I’ve done above in writing ‘single quotation marks’. Words that don’t mean what they seem to say can also be enclosed within these marks, e.g. Someone may write: “My ‘long-lost brother’ came up to me and shook my hand”, when the writer wishes to convey to the readers that the man he refers to is not his long-lost brother, but an impostor, perhaps.

: This is called a ‘colon’. It is most commonly used to introduce a list of items in a sentence, e.g. “Go to the supermarket and buy the following: a loaf of bread, a jar of marmalade and some cheddar cheese.”

; This is called a semicolon. It is a stronger division than a comma, but not as strong as a full-stop. It can be used to separate longer items within a list, e.g. “Go to the supermarket and buy the following: a loaf of brown bread and two loaves of white bread; a jar of Chivers lime marmalade; some Australian cheddar cheese, and two litres of low-fat milk.”

/ This is called a ‘slash’ or a ‘stroke’ and in British English, it can also be called an ‘oblique’. It is a punctuation mark used to separate related items of information, like alternatives (e.g. ‘and/or’), two numbers on a street ‘name’, especially in Malaysia, where we call it a ‘stroke’ (e.g. I live in Jalan SS 22/24?) or two numbers in a fraction, especially when typed (e.g. 1/12 ).

Mind Our English

Malay grammatical terms

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