Self and Others

Among Father’s friends in the vicinity of the Masjid Abidin was one called Che Ali Orang. He was “Orang”, as I later discovered, because of his disconcerting speech habit that knocked you off your presumed place, requiring you — the listener — to re-orientate. He would say, for instance, “Orang gi ppasör sebetör takdi,” to mean “I made a short visit to the market earlier”. He was, like many speakers of Trengganuspeak (and of many other ‘speaks’ too in the wider Malay world) reluctant to throw in the directly personal pronoun (aku, saya) into his conversation, but he replaced it with one that was totally unexpected.

“Orang kata döh takdi!” a mother would say when a careless child trips over while running around the house. What’s fascinating about this remark is that orang (person, people) is used as a personal pronoun for emphasis in this instance, but it was Che Ali’s insistence on taking it to an even wider embrace that earned him the amusing sobriquet.

Malays generally avoid identifying the self so overtly as in the “I” of Indo-European languages, and are even more reluctant to address directly the ‘self’ of another person to whom he is speaking. Saya or more familiarly aku are of course used and understood in everyday speech, but Trengganuspeakers sometimes hide behind the collective pronoun kita (we) or ambe (from standardspeak hamba, servant), or he would even refer to himself by name rather than use the pronoun “I”. “Mbong nak gi dah,” is said by Embong of himself: “I’m going now.” Likewise, a person speaking to Cik (Mr or Miss in Trengganuspeak) Embong would ask him, “Cik Mbong makang döh?” (“Have you [Mbong] eaten?”) More confusingly, he/she may ask, “Kita sapa bila?” (“When did we [i.e. ‘you’] arrive?”). “Nök gi döh kita?” asks a lady at the well of a child in school uniform, laden with a book-filled rucksack. Are we going [to school] now?

Many years ago, a bored American insurance company executive named Benjamin Lee Whorf took up linguistics as a hobby and discovered that language shapes society. Society, it can also be said, shapes language — how a person thinks is reflected in how he speaks. If you ask a Trengganu person “What fruit is that?”, unmindful of Aristotle’s A is A, he/she will reply, “Hök tu orang panggil buöh ppisang, kang?” Now is that an answer or a question? Or does it show an inner sense of modesty that makes this world look like a pretty uncertain place? Haven’t I seen that before in some philosophical works? This shyness about what Stuart Chase* calls ‘the law of identity’ (Aristotle’s A is A) is also found among the Wintu Indians of North America. “We say ‘This is bread’ but in Wintu they say, ‘we call this bread’,” says Chase. Again, ask a Trengganuspeaker what is that? and he/she will reply: “Tu lah kita panggil ggenang.” That’s what we call ggenang. Ask another for directions, and the reply will most probably be, “Kot tu lah kot!” That’s probably the way.

But in one situation a Trengganuspeaker is certain about what he/she is looking for or thinking about. I’ve heard this said many times: “Höh aku dok mmikir pasa nnatang apa takdi?” [about some lost chain of thought], or “Mana dia nnatang tu Mek?” [about some lost things]. And here the lost physical object or abstract thought is referred to simply as nnatang, the beast. And that brings me to my all time favourite: "Kita lupa dök setarang nök bawök nnatang tu!" or its richer, fuller version: "Kita lupa dök setarang nök bawök nnatang tu, döh nök wak guane setabok!"**

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*Stuart Chase, Power of Words, Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., NY; 1954

** "Drats, I forgot to bring that darn thing, can you believe that!"