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Beginners' Malay: Part 1
Jun. 12th, 2011 06:18 pm This is largely for the benefit of the friend I'm trying to teach Malay. ;) These notes basically cover what we did yesterday, and what we'll be doing in the next lesson.
A note concerning pronunciation: On the whole, the Malay language has only one sound for each consonant and vowel, with the exception of E (so it's actually much, much easier than English). However, when encountering a word that ends with the letter A, the "hard A sound" rule may be relaxed so that the final A is pronounced with an "er" sound, which sounds far more natural than a hard "ah!". The government once tried to standardise pronunciation by introducing BAHASA BAKU (which is equivalent to Received Pronunciation in English, and which rigidly conforms to Malay pronunciation rules. BAHASA = language; BAKU = main/standard), but it never caught on. Those of us in school at the time used to jokingly refer to it as BAHASA BEKU (frozen language)!
( Read more... )
A note concerning pronunciation: On the whole, the Malay language has only one sound for each consonant and vowel, with the exception of E (so it's actually much, much easier than English). However, when encountering a word that ends with the letter A, the "hard A sound" rule may be relaxed so that the final A is pronounced with an "er" sound, which sounds far more natural than a hard "ah!". The government once tried to standardise pronunciation by introducing BAHASA BAKU (which is equivalent to Received Pronunciation in English, and which rigidly conforms to Malay pronunciation rules. BAHASA = language; BAKU = main/standard), but it never caught on. Those of us in school at the time used to jokingly refer to it as BAHASA BEKU (frozen language)!
( Read more... )
