Singapore Watch

Source: Straits Times
Date Published: Feb 16, 2005

I REFER to the letters, ‘Singlish not bad English, it’s another language’ by Mr Nur Shahid Ahmad, and ‘English as it should be spoken’ by Dr Lee Siew Peng (ST, Feb 8).

I agree that Singlish should not be considered ‘bad English’, but it is not a separate language altogether.

Singlish is indeed derived from English, and it has undergone evolution until it now incorporates vocabulary and phrases from other local languages. But I would describe it as a dialect of English, rather than a language of its own.

Singlish may be ‘capable of transmitting ideas and thoughts effectively to other speakers of the same language’ - but only in speech. When it is put down on paper, its efficacy in communication breaks down completely.

Communication between people exists not only through speech, but in writing as well. So Singlish should be considered only as a dialect - an alternative form of an established language.

Speakers of Singlish should not be deemed to be of lower social status any more than should those who speak crisp and ‘correct’ English be seen as pretentious. The way a person chooses to speak should be respected by others.

Singaporeans should not be ashamed of Singlish; even author Melvyn Bragg observes in his book, The Adventure Of English, ‘it (Singlish) fits the tongues and the traditions and the vocal rhythms of the people of Singapore much better than official English’.

Dropping of past tenses (’you go out already’), omitting the verb ‘to be’ (’he so stupid’) and including vocabulary from other languages (’wo men go shopping then go makan’) are characteristics of Singlish and may be appreciated fondly by locals able to differentiate between using it among family and friends, and using English as an official medium of communication in business and when abroad.

Unfortunately, our young may grow up with Singlish as the status quo, which may present problems.

The pressing underlying issue that warrants our attention has been identified by Dr Lee: Many code-switching speakers alternate between languages because they are unable to express themselves fully in a particular tongue.

As Singlish becomes the lingua franca that facilitates communication in multiracial Singapore, it also threatens to rob us of the ability to appreciate the richness of the English language - the Oxford English Dictionary has more than 600,000 entries; if we cannot find the appropriate words to express our meaning, then obviously our mastery of the language is not adequate.

If Singlish speakers are capable of conversing fluently in multiple tongues and mix them up only as a matter of choice, it is to their credit. If people are switching between tongues out of necessity, it becomes an urgent matter to be dealt with.

Tan Wei Min
London, UK

Copyright � 2004 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved. Privacy Statement & Condition of Access.

Great tongue-in-cheek article. Got this off mrbrown, who wrote it inToday.

A related article concerning this issue is “What’s wrong with putting family first?‘ by ST.

——

Friday • February 18, 2005

At school or varsity, finding a job or getting married, it’s not like it used be

Dear Mummy,

I am feeling very sad.

Today in school, Zhong Guoren — my classmate from China — beat me again, in a maths test. That boy is an unstoppable genius machine.

Last week, he beat me in sports too.

If he were not here, I would have come in first and gotten a gold. But because the Government says we must welcome foreign talents to increase our population and to improve our economy, I got a bronze instead. This sucks.

At first, we laughed at them, because their English was not very good. Their maths and science were good, and their Chinese was excellent (but who cares about Chinese language, right?). But then, their English got better and now, they are kicking our backsides in this subject too.

I think we should get the Government to do something about this.

Why didn’t you have more babies, Mummy? I wouldn’t mind having a brother or a sister to play with. I am an only child, and because you and Daddy are not making enough babies, we have to get people from other countries, people who make it hard for me to be number one in my class.

I think you are very selfish to just have me, Mummy.

I don’t like to lose, Mummy. I am used to being first in my class. And my school was very small too, like Singapore, so it was easy to be first. Now my school is bigger, and I have to fight harder to be first.

Why can’t we just compete with ourselves, among Singaporeans only (okay, and maybe Permanent Residents)?

Why can’t they have a new category for all the tests and CCAs?

We could have a Best Local Maths Student category and a Best Local Sportsman category, then at least, if I don’t win Best Maths Student, I can be Best Local Maths Student and feel better about myself.

Just like my school is ranked one of the Top 20 Value-added Secondary Schools with a Special Assessment Award for Knitting CCA, I also want to be a top student.

Maybe we need to have a new category like “Top 20 Value-added Secondary Schools (Got China Students)”.

This is because our school has smart foreign students and should be ranked separately so that schools without smart foreign students won’t feel so jealous. And, maybe, we should drop Literature as a subject too. I hate Literature, hard to score “A”s.

In fact, we should have streams like EM1 (Local) and EM1 (China and Others). Let the smart China students have their own stream.

I want to go to university when I grow up, especially the National University of Singapore (NUS), because our newspapers say that NUS is even better than Princeton and Cornell in the United States.

But I hear there are many brilliant China students in NUS, too.

I don’t want to be having private tuition until I am 25 years old, just to keep up with my foreign classmates in the Uni. Or else, I will have no time to meet girls and then I will be forced to go to Vietnam and Kelantan to find a wife when I want to start a family.

In fact, I am very upset with foreigners competing with us even in this area.

All the girls I know say that when they finish studying and go to work, they want to marry ang mohs, because Singapore men are unromantic and do not want to know how to make a girl happy. So, the ang mohs are even stealing our women.

I prefer to marry a Singapore girl, of course, but only if she knows how to cook and wash, and peel my prawns for me (like you, Mummy). But nowadays, Singapore girls are so fierce, just because they study, and earn their own money.

Maybe that is why in Chinatown, I saw this big Singapore Rooster, and it was sitting on eggs. I think the Singapore Hen left him to look after the eggs, because she had to work and do all the things an educated Hen does.

I also worry I cannot find a job when I am older. My friend, Ah Hock, tells me his mother feels all these Chinese foreigners are stealing our jobs and our men (and the ang mohs are stealing our women).

That is very scary, Mummy. You told me many China women are in Singapore only to do naughty things, like relieve old men of their Central Provident Fund money.

Once an uncle wrote in the papers that we should catch those foreign women who are tall, have long hair and legs, and wear tight, revealing outfits in black or red and behave coquettishly.

I think we should only accept foreign women who are short, have short hair and legs, and wear loose, covered-up outfits in white or blue, and behave like a man.

Okay, Mummy, I have to go to my Chinese, maths and science tuition classes now. If I don’t go, I won’t be able to beat Guoren.

Your son,

Khia Soo

Star, Malaysia
February 13, 2005

Insight Down South By Seah Chiang Nee

EDUCATED and financially independent, the new Singaporean woman is running into a wall of male traditions that is leaving some holes in their relationship, including marriage.

The trend had been building up over a couple of decades. In few other countries have women made larger strides in education and careers than in Singapore.

During the past few decades they have caught up with, and even overtaken, men in fields they had once dominated.

In university, women still outnumber men 55-45 with many moving strongly into subjects like media, mathematics, law and engineering, among others.

Recently girls won seven of the top 11 awards for A-level Physics, which had long been a boys’ domain.

Island-wide, women have moved into the highest ranks of the corporate world and commanded artillery units or police divisions, as well as trained jetfighter pilots. Ten women, aged 20-40, are planning to climb Mount Everest.

In short, the new female is able, confident and more than holding up half the heavens, but not getting equal success in their relationship with men.

This is running smack into a traditional male value of wanting to be seen wearing the pants, causing a growing “incompatibility”.

Better education has also led to the woman being perceived as too ambitious, self-centred and materialistic, not qualities that promote romance.

As a consequence, more men are choosing their brides from abroad, especially from China, Vietnam and most of all Malaysia, where historical links remain strong.

I attended five weddings in the last eight months that reflected the trend.

Four of the brides were from Malaysia and China and only one was local. I was told this was becoming a trend that government matchmakers have failed to correct.

One groom with a Johor bride said he had found Singaporean girls too materialistic and demanding. “One specifically set a condition: no living with my parents. She wasn’t happy dating on public buses.”

The women’s relentless pursuit of a career had come at the expense of learning to do simple household chores like cooking, ironing or looking after babies.

“If you want to marry a Singapore girl you must be prepared to eat at hawker centres for life,” one male cynic said.

A marriage agency owner told a radio interviewer how some of the girls had, on the first date, plied the men with questions like: What is your degree and earnings? Do you own a condo? “And they’re surprised when they didn’t get a second date,” she said.

Others find them picky, untrusting and calculative towards love and marriage.

Results of recently released research have found that one in five Singaporean wives is hiding her assets from her husband for fear that he will squander them or in case the marriage fails.

This 20% here compares with France (7.2%), USA (7.6%), Brazil (9%), Romania (12%) and Britain (16.8%).

But there are more hoarders in Japan (38%), Saudi Arabia (32%) and China (21%).

It doesn’t inspire trust. Another sign is the increasing number of cases when a private detective is hired to check on the spouse.

Pre-marital contracts are also becoming more common among people who want to keep their assets out of their spouse’s reach in any divorce. Almost six out of 10 women say in a survey that they are not submissive, while two-thirds believe they could live without men.

The changing female attitude is, of course, only half the cause.

The other is the man sticking to a traditional view that it is his right as head to leave the babies and household work to his working wife. One in two women here have a job.

The social impact is a growing number of single women, especially university graduates.

A growing minority is marrying Westerners.

This has prompted a newspaper reader to urge her well-educated peers to revisit some the traditional feminine traits.

Her letter followed reports that more Singaporeans, including young professional males, were turning abroad for brides.

She said she had worked in Vietnam and found the girls there feminine, their speech melodious.

“They work hard without complaining, carrying loads of cloth and vegetables in the market stalls and food places. Simple, gentle and hardworking, it’s hard not to fall in love with them,” she added.

As for the Malaysian ladies, she finds them “neither loud nor argumentative, (but) pander to the boys’ needs. Not as doormats, but as cheerful assistants, who see it as their obligation to help their men without expecting anything in return.

“Not that they are stupid - oh, no, the Malaysian girls I know are smart and hardworking, with careers of their own.

“But when it comes to matters of the heart, they play the docile, giggly girlfriend with as much aplomb as their Vietnamese counterparts. Again, it’s easy to see where their attraction lies.”

In contrast, the Singapore girl is twice as likely as her Malaysian or Vietnamese counterpart to stride away in a huff or throw water in the male’s face or hold a public screaming or crying fit.

“The Singapore girl debates and argues impassionedly. She wants to win at all costs and treats her love conquests like those fought in the office arena. She may be pretty, yes, smart, yes, but, oh, so demanding.”

The Singapore girl, in short, is a challenge to love, she added.

Although she may, at the end of the day, be a supportive and faithful spouse, the barbs hiding her soft interior are daunting to the suitor.

“She is materialistic, and loves being so. Shopping is a major hobby, and looking good is absolutely essential. The man is but another accessory, a helper, chauffeur, bag carrier.”

There are, however, some 200,000 men who have a poor education and a low salary. Their prospect of marrying a Singapore girl is slim.

One emotional man said online: “I’m fed up with life. Can’t even find a date let alone a wife.” For him and the rest, salvation lies in Vietnam or China.

Seah Chiang Nee is a veteran journalist and editor of the information website littlespeck.com

Article obtained through Singapore Window

ST did some cutting when they published the excerpt on the newspapers. Here’s a more complete transcript of what was really said:

Link to a more complete transcript
Link to the NUS Webcast [Auth required]*

* take note of the crowd reaction if you do watch the webcast. I mean you already know the gist of what LKY and the students said anyway right? The crowd reaction is just weird. They laugh when someone said he wanted to work for the government, and ‘orhh’ when the guy said he was from RI, rosyth. Crowd reaction gives you an indication of a lot about the general opinions/mentality of the people.

p/s if a full transcript of the 1+ hour forum exists, someone let me know where please.

—- [Actual Exchange] —-

Student:
Good evening Mr Lee. My name is Jamie Han, and I’m a history honours student at NUS.

I was frankly rather disappointed at your speech, because I thought you have dealt with the historical… Historiographical problems of history, but as a lawyer, I can see that you are not trained for that area. So anyway, my question is this:

You were talking of general principles in history of looking at the past, and you said that in Singapore, one of the general principles is unity. I do not disagree with you that in this multi-racial society we need unity, but what I am against is…

Are you fetishising unity at the cost of plurality? You said that, maybe it is not part of our culture that we need consensus building and stuff like that, but as the sociologists would tell you, culture is always being made. So…

I’m not questioning your decisions in the past, I’m sure at those times, there was a need for consensus and stability. But I think we have come to the stage where stability is already here and that, in order to progress, the minority viewpoints have to be heard.

And in anticipation of your counter argument that there are channels in which the minority can voice their viewpoints, we all know that in reality these channels are either directly or indirectly controlled by the government.

(MM Lee Laughs)

And I’m not saying that the People’s Action Party is corrupt or anything now.

The truth of the matter is this: No matter how enlightened a despot is, ultimately, he’ll turn into a tyrant if there are no checks and balances in place.

And so I strongly believe that oppressive acts like the printing act and the internal security act should be reviewed. Since, maybe they are no longer relevant, as we have already reached a stage where stability is here. Thank you.

MM Lee: There’s nothing to prevent you from advocating that, pushing that strenuously and finally getting a political party to adopt that platform, and we will put it to the vote. That’s the democratic way of doing it.

—- [End Actual Exchange] —-

Not to nit pick, I noticed that the Straits Times also misquoted MM Lee (It was “that platform” as opposed to “your platform”). So perhaps one could say it was overall incompetence that resulted in this misrepresentation, and it may well be fair to say that the Straits Times was fair to both parties……

The Straits Times also did not publish the better part of MM Lee’s argument, where he raised the example of spontaneous segregation in our society to support his claim that racial harmony is fragile. He stated a case where a Malay family living in a pre-dominantly Chinese area moved out, and another where a Chinese family living in a pre-dominantly non-Chinese area moved out. He had a point there. (I’m trying to be objective here.)

Also, a later exchange where MM Lee took his turn to be rude may also be of interest.

—- [A Later Exchange] —-

MM Lee:
… you say you are prevented from government controlled channels. Have you ever written anything or said anything that has been surpressed? Have you ever written to the forum page in the Straits Times?

Student:
I have written several articles, but only one managed to get through.

MM Lee:
Articles where to?

Student:
To the forum.

MM Lee:
Forum page. [The second word is not entirely clear.]

Student:
The Straits Times Forum.

MM Lee:
What about?

Student:
Issues ranging from the tsunami, to the issue of education, and as I said, the issue of plurality in society.

MM Lee:
Well, why not start a publication. I mean you’ve got a publication in the University; you’ve got several.

Student:
Because the laws that are in place make it very difficult.

MM Lee:
No no no. You are entitled to register. And have… [This bit was too muffled to be heard]

Student:
Theory and practice are two different things. I do not disagree with you that in theory it is possible but there is such a thing known as…

MM Lee:
No. You have the internet. Put up a website.

(Pause)

MM Lee:
You know how to put up a website? [Short pause.] If you don’t I have friends who can help you.

(Audience laughs and applauds.)

Student:
With all due respect sir, I’ve just two more things to say: One, that you are using the fear of the past in order to prevent progress…

(MM Lee laughs)

Student:
And second, you are picking examples of countries which suit your argument whereby I can raise a dozen others to counter with you. But this is not a philosophical discussion so thank you for your time.

—- [End Later Exchange] —-

Goh makes a useful suggestion of a ‘comprehensive career guidance program’, though I’m skeptical about how successful it would be. While such a program may help some, there are many problems which still stands in the way.

The writer is a second-year law student at the London School of Economics. He contributed his thoughts to YouthInk.