Adlina’s Neighborhood

My friend posted an interesting facebook status regarding us Malaysians:

When Malaysians are busy, they tend to eat a lot and become fat. but it's the same case when they are on holidays. and that is the Malaysian Dilemma.

I commented,

we probably eat 5 times a day excluding when we r bz, when we r bored, when we r watching the tv, when we are hanging out, when we are celebrating sumthin, when we r stressed out, when we r happy, when we r on holidays, when we r making frens, when we r having a banquet, when we r studying, bfr going 2 sleep.. some may get fat n some may not. but some may attempt to try n get fat. so where's the part of our lives that we don't eat?

A Spanish friend of mine even asked us how we can be so into this eating habit that we have open houses almost everyday during Eid festive.

So, I assume that if you don't agree with the first statement, then you are not "truly Malaysian". Hahaha.

I am still not over with this issue.

I was watching this documentary and saw the comments which I found not reliable if I were among those people who were working in the plantation. As someone who loves the environment myself, the palm plantation had limited the movements of the Orang Utans, and the government should start revitalising the rainforests by planting trees that can grow tall by 50 years, instead of just focusing on the plantation. Tourism can help a lot in Sabah, though it may not help to produce as much job opportunities.

People who don't know the real deal may just say by buying one litre of palm oil you are actually killing more orang utans. But like what has been said by Aput who had worked in the palm oil industry, it is evident that the we are just reusing the agricultural land from being a waste of our economy.

It is ironic how people who were the first to introduction palm plantation to the country are now against what they had practiced.

And the palm plantation was established to save the economy from being vastly timber-based (which was also introduced and practiced by the outsiders), which is far more devastating . And it gives people job opportunities, avoiding them from doing things like illegal logging.

And at least we still have our rainforest and orang utans. And we don't do open burning just for the sake of the palm plantation.

So instead of boycotting the palm oil which won't help to destroy the palm plantation and grow more trees (in fact ruining our economy, thus further losing hope of saving the rainforest which can be costly), you should start adopting Orang Utans and breed them in your own country. At least you know that they are safe under your care. As for us living here, we should start spending on replanting the trees to save the future generation. Not building skyscrapers.

Maybe we will have Bapa Perhutanan in future?

What's your favorite thing about the holidays? Least favorite?

The most favourite thing? Being able to spend more time with my family. Least favourite? Not being able to spend time with my friends. But they said there's no place like home. So I wouldn't regret it. It is better to spend your time now or you won't be able to do it again in future.

It's about language again! It seems like I have been revising for my exam through my blog (when actually I am more of procastinating). If you feel like it would cause a cognitive overload, don't bother reading this. But I find this interesting so I want to share what I understand with everyone.

Today everyone is struggling to get their language recognised, preserved and practised in all levels. However, there are always challenges to that, such as money and government intervention towards language policy. Multilingualism has always been a problem to countries that are made up of different racial and cultural backgrounds. However, in today's world, it is almost impossible to say that a country is made up of only one race and one language. All of this are just an ideology imposed by the politicians and those in power to make us believe that the country can be a better place if everyone is united under one language.

The countries that has multilingual policies include Canada, Belgium and Singapore to name a few. Canada for example, has English and French majority of speakers. Belgium has three distinctive languages in different regions such as French in Brussels, Flemish in the northern part of the country and German in the southern part bordering German. Singapore has 4 official languages, and one national language.

The reason for the existence of different languages include colonization, trades and history. Canada was once colonised by the French Empire before being almost entirely succumbed by the British expansion. That explains the reason why only one part of the country which is inhabitant by a large majority of French speakers, which is Quebec. When the British and French came in contact for the first time, they decided to have the legislation and parts of the administration to be constructed in both languages. Thus, they became in effect, becoming official languages, and were used until today. Only Quebec in unilingual in which French is the official language.

Singapore was a thriving trade post and attracted merchants from different parts of the world. However, not until the total inclusion of the island into the British Empire, the language was focused on Malay and English. When the Chinese labour were brought to the island, they made up the majority of the population. Therefore, mandarin, a dialect accepted as a lingua franca for all the Chinese, gain an importance in the area. Since 1979, the government has been encouraging the population to speak Mandarin Chinese. However by the late 1990s, despite being considered successful, the language had to compete with English language which was becoming more important.

When Singapore became independent from Malaya, four languages -Malay, English, Mandarin Chinese and Tamil were recognised as the official languages of Singapore due to the significant number of speakers on the island. However, Malay was being acknowledged as the 'national language' of Singapore since the island was once part of Johore Empire, a Malay dominated region.

When the population shifted, so did the language. When a country is colonised, so did the language. 

Just found this animation which might be of your interest. I'm pretty sure I can get my stuff done after watching this. lol.

I was browsing through my facebook and found some gruesome pictures of an incident posted by my friend Adlina. A car hit a wall on the rooftop parking lot, fell down and claimed the lives of two master skills students. After reading the news I found out that the driver and the passenger ran away right after the incident. I would assume that it wasn't suicidal, and both the driver and the passenger managed to jump off the car before it hit the wall. The building's durability was also questioned. For whatever reason that it happened, I pray for the families of the deceased. May they be among those who struggled for the cause of good. Al fatihah.

Link to pictures

Here's the 2009 recap. I was doing the coin toss. I flipped the coin. It was tails, so I will have no more teen years next year in February. There's a countdown for graduation for myself, which is on the Vox's widget sidebar. So, it's "goodbye, surfing the internet (Web 1.0)", and "hello, Web 2.0". Here's what I have been drawing:

The coryrobertsintokyo.net splash page, including the "ENTER" arrow, which takes you to the new blog (which is not ready yet):

CRIT splash

I used colored pencils and softlead pencils to make the drawing. Also, this:

Social Network buttons

I bought my first Arashi album (read this here) from CDJapan, my father was thinking, "Why do you buy CDs from Japan?" The two CDs from that site costs about $60, then my father recommended me to buy the CDs during my Tokyo trip. The only thing to work for money before graduation is applying for a job. So, I will have to apply for a job. I will not write any long posts on my new blog, just the short posts. Need Arashi's 10 anniversary Vox banners? Here (part 1, part 2). Just remember to credit me ("Cory" or "coryrobertsintokyo").

I'm getting a new camera, it's a Nikon DSLR (it will be bought at Amazon.com, along the new Casio compass watch), they will bought in the future.

Japandesktop

The final drawing before I go on winter hiatus:

Dear Friends

Language travels across the sea. When I learned history back in secondary school, Malay language was known to be the 'lingua franca' of the Malay archipelago. The archipelago was the home of thousands of different languages. However, the Malay language was dominant as it was used in trades, literature, and at some point, politics.

So what is lingua franca? Must everyone posess a lingua franca to survive? Lingua franca is a language that is used to communicate with people who are not sharing a mother tongue. Lingua franca became apparent during the colonization period. Malacca, being an important capital of economy back then, gained its significant in spreading the language across the region. Thus, the language that travels are advantagous in terms of expansion of terms and structures, as it adapts and assimilates other people's languages into its own. Malay language was one of those languages that expanded in the 15th century. Therefore I don't find it odd if historians believe that there are only 4 words in the Malay dictionary which is 'originally Malay'.

Similarly, English language underwent the same evolution. When the British became the biggest colonial power in the world, the language has adapted millions of words from the colonised countries. However, much of the old and classical English were abandoned. English itself was an evolution of Germanic language, but it such fact seemed to be non-existent to most speakers. So English, as we know today, had underwent expansion more than ever.

From my observation, I could see that one of the characteristics of a lingua franca, is that the language can easily be acquired and learned. According to some people, the reason why English was adopted in their lives was because it was easy to learn. Some went as far as saying that it was easier than learning French, as it does not have particular structures for particular contexts. Malay language, during the Malacca sultanate, had the same feature -as it was easy for everyone to learn. Even until today, people find it easy to learn basic Malay language because of its simple grammar. A friend of mine once said that it was easier for her to learn Malay than to learn Spanish even though she was majoring in teaching Spanish.

Another reason was that the language wasn't imposed or confined to the conquered area, but instead it was used voluntarily by speakers of other languages in order to be able to communicate with people posessing the language. This was prevalent during the decolonization period, as colonized parties began to use English effectively to express their dissatisfaction towards the British. Furthermore, there was no governing bodies that say "English should strictly be like this, and there should be no outside words coming in" as what the Academie Francais is doing. In fact, they invited other languages to contribute their words into the dictionary. This phenomenon may have been one of the reasons of decline in Malay Language, as it was controlled by the The Institute of Language and Literature (DBP) and the structures and the number of new entries were restricted in the dictionary.

Despite this, I am not saying that what Acadamie Francais and DBP are doing is wrong. The threat of expansion as what is happening in English language is that it is slowly being a language that is adapting other people's language. I once read a book that discussed a possible outcome of this. It might be, in future, that English will no longer become a sole language of the world, but instead it became divided and evolved into different languages in different countries. The 'original English' itself would be dead. But other languages that are controlled - even though they don't develop rapidly - would gain significant and survive within the community. That may have been the only danger of lingua franca.

Do you remember the things you did when you first started using the Web and how it has changed your life?

Sponsored by Yahoo!

The first time I was introduced to the internet was through my uncle, as he set up his own computer services office. I was still a little kid back then. We had our first browser called 'Netscape', and there was an animated comet in its which I found was cool. We started of with the homepage called 'Jaring' (which means 'net' in Malay), which served as our default search provider. However, it was not long until I began to know about Yahoo. And I grew up with Yahoo since then (though my email account was Hotmail).

When I was a kid I really liked to talk to people who were outside of my own circle. Even though I was not that friendly back then, I found it much easier to communicate with people without looking at their face. Then I was introduced to mIRC. The great thing about mIRC was that I was able to connect with people as far as the US.

I also liked to create a realm where I could share my interest with people. It all started with a bunch of words written in the Word and put into a floppy, and developed into a homepage with logos, images and symbols that I designed. All were uploaded in Geocities, a famous webhosting site back then. The funny thing was I never realized that the logo that I created was a symbol of Communism, which was considered as sensitive and threatening back then. But I omitted the hammer and had bright colours on the logo -so people wouldn't probably recognized it.

It took me about 30 minutes each month to update the site, due to the 56kbs connection and the limited bandwith.

And slowly I became aware of the advantages of the internet and webpages that I began to experiment with a lot of things. I anticipated the development of the internet and predicted that someday we might be able to stream videos and music and interact with each other using this technology. With the advent of Web 2.0, everything became a reality. Even though such technology existed way beforehand, it wasn't as easy in terms of scripting as today. 

Now I can update my site in just 5 minutes each day, though I'm still facing a problem with limited bandwith.

At one point life is made easy with internet.

Previously I have talked about standard Arabic and how it affected people in the Arab world through the discussion with our Sudanese friend, Amin. Amin has left for Sudan now. But his knowledge that was given to us has greatly affected our thinking about language, particularly Arabic in which we always take for granted. And just now we had a discussion on Standard English language with our lecturer before our final exam. The case is almost the same with Arabic, with a slightly different way of interpreting what 'Standard English' is all about.

When we talk about Standard Arabic, we talk about the classical Arabic which is the foundation of the modern Arabic (in wikipedia both classical and modern are 'standard' at their own expense, but modern Arabic is derived from the classical one). Classical Arabic, or Quranic Arabic, was used during the development of Islam. Thus, the texts, the use, and the aesthetic aspect of the language were confined within the study of the religious text, which is similar to previous Semitic languages used in scriptures. However, through trading and conquests, new vocabulary and language structure were brought in, and they became the modern standard Arabic, which differs greatly between countries in the Middle East. However, the Classical Arabic remains the same, due to its role in religious rituals and education. Thus, it does not extinct nor expanding. However, so long as people, particularly Muslims, read and study the texts, the language will thrive on its own.

While people recognize Classical Arabic as the 'Standard Arabic' used by Muslims, Standard English is still struggling with its own identity. Instead of having one 'Standard English', people are arguing that there actually a lot of Standard Englishes. This is because English takes a different path in its development. In the old days (even until today),  there were a lot of varieties in English language in terms of dialect and accent. When the English entered the age of exploration, they 'exported' their language to their colonized country, while 'importing' some of the regional languages and adapting into their own language. The reason of such adaptation was to be able to communicate effectively with the people in the regions. It was not until the 18th century that the British began to realize language in general was equivalent to power and prestige. So they decided to adopt an acceptable English variety, and began standardizing and codifying. So that was the evolution of Standard British English.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another variety of English was growing rapidly. It is often told that this variety English was 'much closer' to the English that were used at the beginning of the exploration. However, there were also parts of the language was simplified such as the spelling and the structure. It was the American English. However, during the early years of the country, the use American language was limited to its own country (and they did not emphasis on the language when they establish trades with other countries). It wasn't until WWII that they play a big role in almost all aspect of English. The Brittish Empire slowly went into decline, bringing their language with them. Many people across the world migrated to the US and contributed in the development of the language. The language became even more powerful when it was widely used in communication and information technology. So that was the evolution of Standard American language.

So which one would you choose as a Standard English language? The Queen's English or the American ones?