33.2520, Review: Austronesian; Language Documentation: Lee (2022)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-33-2520. Tue Aug 16 2022. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 33.2520, Review: Austronesian; Language Documentation: Lee (2022)

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Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2022 18:03:17
From: David Karaj [davidmkaraj at gmail.com]
Subject: A Grammar of Modern Baba Malay

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36810997


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/33/33-1404.html

AUTHOR: Nala H. Lee
TITLE: A Grammar of Modern Baba Malay
SERIES TITLE: Mouton Grammar Library
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: David M. Karaj

SUMMARY

“A Grammar of Modern Baba Malay”, by Nala H. Lee, is a work of language
documentation aimed at describing a severely endangered contact language
spoken in Singapore. The book is a revised version of the author’s 2014 PhD
dissertation based on the author’s fieldwork. Since the work aims to be a
systematic language description, its chapters and their contents are largely
self-explanatory, as they follow a more or less “typical” structure of many
grammars.

The book opens with an Introduction, which gives the reader a brief overview
of Baba Malay typological features, its sound system, morphology, and syntax.
It further presents the speakers from whom the data have been elicited and
explains some of the conventions used and the structure of the work.

The second chapter – “Baba Malay and its speakers” — gives the reader more
details regarding the language described, such as the locations where it is
spoken, a note on its history, its internal variation, the number of speakers,
and the community responses to language endangerment.

Chapter Three – “Phonetics and phonology” — discusses the sounds of Baba
Malay. It is illustrated with spectrograms, and treats phonotactics and
various phonetic processes, word stress, intonation, etc.

The fourth chapter — “Parts of speech” — demonstrates the syntactic
distribution of the language’s parts of speech, illustrated with sample
sentences.

Chapter Five — “Syntax” — presents the types of phrases and clauses in Baba
Malay.

Chapter Six points out some differences between Baba Malay as spoken in
Singapore and in Malacca (Malaysia). The differences are observed in phonetics
and phonology, as well as the domains of morphology and syntax. The author
shares her suggestions as to how these two subvarieties may diverge further.

The final part of the book – Appendices — gives language samples: word lists
(a Swadesh list, kinship terms, expressions for day, month, and time); glossed
texts (extracts from the field recordings, ten pieces of Malay poetry
(“pantun”) composed by one of the informants) and, finally, a lexicon and
reverse index.

EVALUATION

“A Grammar of Modern Baba Malay” is, in its author’s words, “a descriptive
grammar that has been written to be of use to a wide audience” (p. 11).
Indeed, the technical jargon is kept to a minimum and Lee uses basic
grammatical terms in her language description. Therefore, I consider this book
to be quite accessible to an audience without a solid linguistic training.
Moreover, the contents of the grammar follow a typical structure, i.e.,
starting from a collection of facts about the described language, followed by
the description of its sound system, parts of speech, types of phrases, etc.,
as outlined in the SUMMARY above.

As stated, the book is a revised version of the author’s 2014 PhD dissertation
“A grammar of Baba Malay with sociophonetic considerations”. While in its
current form the title does not contain the “sociophonetic considerations”
part, the stress on phonetics, phonology, and language ecology of the
described variety are clearly understood across the chapters. The data on
which this study is based were elicited between 2012 and 2014 from Baba Malay
speakers in Singapore and one speaker in Malacca, Malaysia (the author does
not provide details as to the exact amount of data).

While the author took care to keep technical linguistic terms to a minimum, in
order to make her work more accessible to a non-linguistic audience some terms
should have been clearly specified. I believe that the work could have greatly
benefited from using more precise terminology. For instance, across the
“Grammar” we can find terms such as: “Malay”, “Standard Malay”, “Bahasa
Melayu”, “Bahasa Indonesia” (the last two are Malay/Indonesian terms referring
to Malay and Indonesian language, respectively) used, it seems,
interchangeably, as the author does not explain what she means by using these
terms. While personally I refrain from using endonyms such as “Bahasa Melayu”
(after all, when discussing Russian, we do not call it “russkiy yazyk” in
English), I also believe that using these terms could be easily misleading,
particularly to those readers who are not familiar with the linguistic
situation in the discussed areas. First of all, Malay is a very broad category
encompassing numerous standard and non-standard varieties; therefore, in many
instances, we cannot be sure which one of the many “Malays” the author is
referring to. In one of the chapters, for instance, Lee refers (p. 110) to
“Standard Malay of Malaysia and Indonesia”, and uninitiated readers could ask
themselves here what is the difference between “Bahasa Indonesia”,
“Indonesian”, and “Standard Malay of Malaysia and Indonesia”.

On the side of strictly linguistic terminology, some parts are quite
confusing. For example, I do not understand why the author considers “belom”
‘not.yet’ to be a future marker (pp. 170-171; 175) – “belom”, or in other
Malay varieties, “belum”, marks incomplete actions and does not imply that a
given event would be taking place in the future; from Lee’s description it
seems that this is also the case of Baba Malay. Another surprising statement
can be found on pp. 240-241 where the author says that the progressive marker
‘“tengah” has been noted to be more formal than “sedang’” and this statement
is followed by a citation of Mintz’s grammar (1994). Surprised by this claim
(because “tengah” is a feature of spoken, colloquial Malay), I have checked
the given reference, and Mintz (1994: 76) states the opposite: ‘“tengah” is
generally considered more informal than “sedang”’. This can be further
supported by Asmah (2015: 123), where “tengah” is described as being used only
in the spoken (i.e. colloquial language) and Nik et al. (2015), a normative
grammar published by the Malaysian language regulation body, does not mention
“tengah” at all; the only progressive marker discussed is “sedang” (suggesting
that “tengah” belongs to the informal varieties). On a similar note, in the
realm of Standard Malay grammar, when explaining on pp. 20-21 the etymology of
the word “peranakan” (used to describe speakers of Baba Malay), Lee states
that the word breaks down to “beranak” (‘give birth’ from “anak” ‘child’) plus
a nominalizer “-an”, suggesting further the devoicing of the initial ‘b’,
disregarding other etymologies as ‘implausible’. The author seems to be
unaware (p. 21) of the Malay circumfix “per-an” which, when attached to a
verb, signifies a process; a result of action; a place where given action is
performed (Sneddon et al. 2010: 45-46; Mintz 2014: 196ff.; Asmah 2015: 73-76;
Nik et al. 2015: 127-129), which very neatly explains the origin and possible
meaning(s) of the term “peranakan”. Regarding the etymologies, some issues can
be found in the Appendix – the wordlists contain a number of inaccuracies,
e.g., on p. 355 the word “sihat” ‘healthy’ comes from Arabic, not from Malay,
“seluar” ‘trousers’ is Persian, not Malay, and similarly on p. 348 both
“jawab” ‘answer’ and “heran” ‘amazed’ are from Arabic, not Malay.

Like any text, “A Grammar of Modern Baba Malay” is not free from various
editing shortcomings. In general the book has very few typographical errors
and they usually do not affect the content of the work in significant ways. I
would only like to point out two instances: on p. 58, footnote 35 the Malay
word kerja is transcribed as [ker.ja] but it should be: [kәr.dʒa], similarly,
on p. 343 anjing ‘dog’ is transcribed as [an.dʒing] instead of expected
[an.dʒiŋ]. On a more technical side, the book contains a large number of
citations not listed under the References – I have counted over 20 such
citations: pp. 110; 112; 139; 140; 160; 161; 233; 239; 258. The list might not
be exhaustive and, besides that, the references at the end of the book are not
arranged in a chronological order, which might make looking for a specific
citation a source of irritation.

Another issue I would like to point out are the translations of the example
sentences, many of which do not sound very natural. Moreover, very often the
translations do not reflect the tense, mood, or aspect of the given Baba Malay
example (and if the English sentence could reflect these nuances, I see no
reason not to use this opportunity, as a step towards helping the reader). For
instance on p. 171 the author discusses perfective sentences but translates
them with the simple past, where using the present perfect here could make the
example clearer, especially to non-linguists. Similarly on p. 106 in example
(179) ‘Go sleep’ the author specifies that this sentence is not imperative as
in Baba Malay the pronouns can be omitted. I would suggest adding the context
in brackets resulting in “(I) go (to) sleep”, or “(And then I) go (to) sleep”,
otherwise the English translation remains ambiguous and does not look very
different from the glosses. One more example is on p. 184, where the author
translates the superlative “yang manis sekali” literally as ‘that is very
sweet’ (example 543), which, I believe, might come off as confusing for a
reader who is not familiar with Malay and related languages; translating this
example as “the sweetest”, while perhaps not entirely faithful to the Malay
original word-by-word, would more accurately show the actual meaning of the
phrase.

Besides these critical remarks addressing more specific points, my more
general criticism is that, in many aspects, the treatment of certain topics
could have been less superficial. For instance, I wish the grammatical aspects
of Baba Malay had received more discussion from the author. Very often a given
phenomenon is introduced with a couple of sentences and copiously illustrated
with examples. I believe that more context and more extensive comments from
the author would be much appreciated, particularly by an audience that is not
very familiar with the language area. Similarly, I would have preferred the
section on phonetics and phonology to include descriptions of a given sound’s
articulation; unfortunately, the reader is left only with a spectrogram (a
great addition nonetheless) and a sentence or two of the author’s comment.

To sum up, “A Grammar of Modern Baba Malay”, despite a few minor and major
issues, fulfils what seems to be its author’s goal – to provide documentation
of an endangered contact language of Southeast Asia. Among the strengths of
the volume I would like to highlight the extensive chapter on phonetics (an
aspect completely ignored in, for example, most grammars of Indonesian and
Malay) and the general large number of language examples — 823 glossed
examples across 247 pages (without the appendices). The language data that is
the basis of this book was made available online (although I was not able to
find the files on the indicated website), which is an excellent idea for
readers interested in the sounds of Baba Malay. Similarly, the appendix
includes around 80 pages of glossed Baba Malay texts, which enables readers to
analyse some of the language aspects on their own. Since the described
language is considered severely endangered, the author puts a lot of stress on
aspects of language endangerment. A nice addition is Chapter 6, “Differences
between Baba Malay spoken in Singapore and Malacca”, where Lee compares
aspects of phonology, morphology, and syntax of both varieties, finding a
number of differences. This chapter offers some interesting insights into the
diverging ecologies of Baba Malay. Some comparisons are also present in other
chapters, mostly to Standard Malay. While an attempt at drawing parallels to
the lexifier language are understandable, I would like to suggest that
confronting Baba Malay with Colloquial Malay (Koh 1990) could show numerous
interesting similarities. In general, while I wish that certain aspects would
have received a more rigorous treatment, I do believe that readers – linguists
and non-linguists alike – could gain some useful insights from Lee’s “A
Grammar of Modern Baba Malay”.

REFERENCES

Asmah Haji Omar. 2015. Nahu Melayu Mutakhir. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka,
Kementerian Pelajaran, Malaysia.

Koh, Ann Sweesun. 1990 Topics in colloquial Malay. PhD dissertation.
University of Melbourne.

Mintz, Malcolm. W. 1994. A student's grammar of malay & indonesian. EPB
Publishers.

Nik Safiah Karim, Farid Mohd, Hashim bin Hj Musa, Abdul Hamid Mahmood,
Muhammed Salehudin Aman, Abdul Ghalib Yunus, and Farid M. Onn. 2015.
Tatabahasa dewan. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kuala Lumpur.

Sneddon, James Neil, Alexander Adelaar, Dwi Noverini Djenar, and Michael C.
Ewing. 2010. Indonesian reference grammar. New South Wales: Allen and Unwin.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

David M. Karaj is a PhD candidate at the University of Pavia, Italy. His main
research interests regard the Malay language, linguistic typology, syntax and
valency-changing phenomena.





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