Linguistic False Friend (Singapore)

 

For those who might not know:

(from googling)

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Linguistic false friends are words in different languages that look or sound similar but have very different meanings, causing misunderstandings for language learners. For example, the Spanish word embarazada (pregnant) looks like the English word "embarrassed". Other common examples include English "gift" (present) and German "Gift" (poison), or French "librairie" (bookstore) and English "library" (a place to borrow books).

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    I did a short stint as a temporary teacher (supply teacher it's called here in the UK) in 1973 while waiting for my 'A' level results from the University of Cambridge.

    I was given various classes at this English stream school, teaching English and PE (Physical Education) to 13-year-olds, one of whom was a girl called Honi from Indonesia.

    She was one of a group of Indonesian Chinese youngsters at that school whose parents decided to send them to Singapore for their schooling.  They were aged 10 to 16, pitched into a school where all the subjects (except Second Language, which was compulsory) were taught in English.

    A bit of background here.  In those days (in the 1960s and 1970s), Singapore's schools were in four different streams:  Chinese stream, Malay stream, Indian stream and English stream.  The first three types were attended by mostly, not exclusively, children from those respective ethnic groups, with the second language (compulsory) being English (no choice).  English stream schools had children from any of the three ethnic groups (plus Eurasians), and they had a choice of second language.  Children from Chinese backgrounds would generally choose Mandarin for their second language (or Malay for Peranakans – Chinese people who have adopted the Malay lifestyle: in dress, language, food, etc).  Children from a Malay background would generally choose Malay.  Those from an Indian background would generally go for Tamil (the officially chosen language for representing people from the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka [Ceylon]).

    Back to those Indonesian children, freshly arrived and dropped straight into Secondary One (aged 12) or higher in an English stream school, with very little working English, which meant that they had to work extra hard (and engage a private tutor to help them with all their school subjects – I was that private tutor for a year).

    One day, Honi came to me, feeling very hard done by.  She'd sat a Science test, with one of the questions being:  "Give an example of a liquid state."  She'd written "Air", which got marked wrong.

    The Linguistic False Friend at work here:  In Indonesian, the working language in Honi's head, the word for "water" is "air" (pronounced ah-yer), which of course came out wrong in a test conducted in the English language.  If Honi had been thinking in Malay, which has "water" written as "ayer" (there are street names in Singapore with "ayer" in them:  Kreta Ayer Road, Telok Ayer Street), she would've written down "ayer" for the example of a liquid state, and the teacher would've guessed what she meant, even though "ayer" is not an English word.

(Singapore, 1973)