You know how sometimes in life you bump into someone you wished you never knew..? And then you try your best to put him out of your mind and hope you never see him again.
But then one day out of nowhere you suddenly get this bad premonition that he'll appear again all of a sudden and your mind races through the thousand and one possible scenarios that might happen in the unfortunate occasion that you do meet.
Thank goodness those thousand and one scenarios never happened.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Singlish
Is it any wonder that Singaporeans would have our own brand of English?
This foreign language that belongs to none of us, yet forcibly injected into our legal and education systems.
Even in China where Chinese is the language of birth, there are hundreds of dialects and variations; how can we expect Singaporeans, who learnt the language from scratch in one generation to speak and write English without a sprinkle of our background?
Singlish is what makes us Singaporean. It's our shared history, culture and unspoken words. It gives meaning to the single "Yes", and life to "I agree with you".
So why, really, clamp it down?
All that matters is that we know how to keep it back when we're talking to others who are not us right?
This foreign language that belongs to none of us, yet forcibly injected into our legal and education systems.
Even in China where Chinese is the language of birth, there are hundreds of dialects and variations; how can we expect Singaporeans, who learnt the language from scratch in one generation to speak and write English without a sprinkle of our background?
Singlish is what makes us Singaporean. It's our shared history, culture and unspoken words. It gives meaning to the single "Yes", and life to "I agree with you".
So why, really, clamp it down?
All that matters is that we know how to keep it back when we're talking to others who are not us right?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)