english and the taiwanese media
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 (8:07 PM)
news (?) of the taiwanese media making comments and laughing over our singapore-flavoured accent of the english language is no longer anything new. at least not enough to be in the newspaper. but the latest entries in star blog that i read off mypaper led me to visit the actual blogs of those personalities and inevitably triggered the linguist-cum-critic-itch in me to actually post this here.
first and foremost, maia lee mentioned that english is our second language despite the fact that our education system has all along taught english as the first language. is there a contradiction then since our native tongue is mandarin as she accurately pointed out?
in dawn yang's post, she repeatedly referred to the 'singlish accent'. i hope i get this right as i believe that singlish is not an accent. it is a structural difference. singaporean accent is another issue and accents are never wrong because, as i have often argued my case in stomp, accent is not a measurement of proficiency. grammar is!
jamie yeo made an accurate observation that singaporeans speak english lazily which probably explains why the phonemes we have are left with the short vowels.
i kinda like most of the later half of what egena wrote and i'm having extreme difficulty pronouncing her name despite the guide she gave. the only thing i know is that, true to the nature of english, you don't read it the way it's spelt.
i recall a really old taiwanese variety i caught eons ago where 2 celebrities hit the streets to find someone who can translate 米粉汤 to english. some students walked by and chose the guy best in english among the group to do the translation and what did he come up with? rice pink soup. go figure. more examples? when stefanie sun said 'retro', the subtitle came up 'rachel'.
finally, as a comment on the taiwanese video, i have to state that 微如 (if i did get her name correct) appeared to use a philippino or thai accent and claim that it belongs to singaporeans. she probably should find out more about the people whom she came into contact with during her time here and realise that not everyone in singapore is a singaporean.
and to the taiwanese english teacher? that's the difference between a teacher and a linguist. i rest my case.