The Elderly

This appeared in the online version of the Straits Times (ST Interactive, 17 January 2012). 

Elderly in this context is a noun, and like all other nouns derived from adjectives or adjective phrases and used to refer collectively to a group, it is considered plural.  Hence, prescriptively, singular enjoys is wrong and plural enjoy is preferred.  Similar nouns include (the) dispossessed, less fortunate, sick, meek and brave.

Horn/Honk

A more standard word would be honking (poster in a North-East Line station).  While horn is often used as a verb in Singapore (e.g. He keeps horning at me), in other varieties of English, the same idea is expressed as to sound the horn or to honk.

Flower/Flour

In other varieties of English, flour and flower are homophones, i.e. they are pronounced alike. In British English, for example, flour and flower are both pronounced /flaʊə/. 

In Singapore, however, they are not homophones — ignoring actual vowel quality (i.e. /a, ʌ, ɑ/), flower is /flawə/ while flour is /flaː/. The pronunciation of flour is probably a result of smoothing, in which less salient vowels are dropped.

Subject–Verb Agreement

The highlighted verb (Straits Times Life!, 9 September 2011) would probably have English teachers reaching for their red pens. The correct form is the singular has, rather than plural have, because the verb should agree with the head noun, collection, and not the nearest noun, watercolours.

Incidentally, in British English the name Farquhar is pronounced /ˈfɑːkə/ or /ˈfɑːkwə/. However, most Singaporeans who have attended English-medium schools will remember having been taught the pronunciation /ˈfɑːkwɑː/. Considering that Singaporeans generally make no distinction between /ʌ/ and /ɑː/, insisting on using the British pronunciation for this British name would probably be ill advised.

Kena

When teaching grammar, and in particular passive verb groups, I’ve often found it useful to use the Singlish passive marker, kena — this is because many students have great difficulty telling whether a clause is in the active or passive voice.

In English, the passive voice is usually formed with the appropriate form of be or get:

(1)  Shirley was/got promoted last week.
(2)  Shirley was/got cheated last week.

Using the passive marker kena is a useful test for the passive voice: if it can be used in place of be/get, then the clause is probably passive.  However, the ‘kena’ test has an important limitation: it can be used only with outcomes considered to be negative or undesired:

(3)  * Shirley kena promoted last week.  (positive outcome, ungrammatical in Singlish)
(4)  Shirley kena cheated last week. (negative outcome, grammatical in Singlish)

Leaving aside the issue of preferred verb forms in Singlish (kena cheat is more likely), we note that (4) is good because it describes an event considered negative or undesired (i.e. nobody likes to be cheated), but (3) is definitely out because most people would wish to be promoted.  For this reason, kena is said to a marker of the adversative passive.

How Come You Never Call Me?

To many people in Singapore, Peppermint Patty must sound very Singaporean in the first panel.

For starters, how come? is widely believed to be a Singlish expression, but it is not, and is in fact very common in colloquial American English (Peanuts is, of course, American).

Furthermore, Peppermint Patty’s utterance differs from Singlish in two important respects.  First, as is obvious from the subsequent panels, she really means ‘Why do you never call me?’ whereas in Singlish never is often used as a simple negator, so the most obvious meaning to most Singaporeans would be ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ 

Second, Peppermint Patty would probably never drop you, whereas for most Singaporeans it is redundant and stylistically heavy since Singlish is a pro-drop (null subject) language and subject and object pronouns need not be expressed if their referents (here, Chuck and the speaker, Peppermint Patty) are understood or recoverable from context.  In other words, the most natural formulation of the sentence in Singlish would be Why never call?  (Call in Standard English may also be intransitive, in which case Why don’t you ever call? does not have a missing object pronoun, me.)

Railway

This is one I cannot be absolutely sure about, but I suspect the highlighted verb ought to be sits rather than sit since the noun railway as used in this sense is noncount, hence singular (Straits Times, 16 June 2011).  Similarly, we would say Six cups of coffee a day is excessive, not are.

18 Years Old

Make it 18 years old, without any hyphens (New Paper, 9 August 2011). 

The rule to remember here is that if the compound adjective comes before the noun, it should be hyphenated (as if to show it functions as a single adjective), and that the unit of measure is singular (year): an 18-year-old student. 

However, if it comes after a linking verb (in this case be), it loses the hyphens and the unit of measure becomes plural: He may only be 18 years old.  (Pedants might also point out that only should precede 18 rather than be, since it modifies the age rather than the verb.)

If used as a noun in its own right, it is hyphenated: Even as an 18-year-old, Jim was incredibly mature for his age.

Diffused/Defused

The verb needed in both cases was defused (Today 27 June 2011).  Both diffuse and defuse are commonly confused, almost certainly because they are near-homophones.

Defuse (/ˌdiːˈfjuːz/) means ‘to stop a possibly dangerous or difficult situation from developing, especially by making people less angry or nervous’ (Oxford Advanced Learner’s), and is clearly the meaning intended here.

Diffuse (/dɪˈfjuːz/), on the other hand, means ‘to spread something or become spread widely in all directions’.

Subject–Verb Agreement

The verb are above is wrong; make it is (Straits Times Life! 26 May 2011). 

In English, the verb following a subject should agree with the subject; but if the subject is a complex noun phrase (in this case, TV drama Skins, which shows teens doing drugs and binge drinking), the verb almost always agrees with the head of that noun phrase.

The headline writer has presumably made the verb agree with the plural Skins, but the head of the noun phrase is in fact the singular drama.

Sink, Sank, Sunk

The highlighted verb is intended to be in the simple present tense, so it should be sank (Straits Times online, 12 August 2011). 

Sunk is, of course, the –en/ed participle of the verb sink, which has irregular past (sank) and –en/ed participle (sunk) forms, so we do not say His heart *sinked/*has sinked.

The –en/ed participle is more commonly known, especially in schools, as the past participle, but this is inaccurate since past tense is not inherent in the verb form, as the following examples illustrate:

(1)  The yacht has sunk.  (present perfective)
(2)  The yacht had sunk.  (past perfective)
(3)  The yacht will have sunk.  (modal perfective, referring to future time)

Note that, in all three cases, the verb sunk remains unchanged and any tense marking is left to the other, auxiliary verbs.

Noncount Nouns

This an advertisement on the Straits Times website.  The noun stuff is noncount in Standard English, but in Singapore English is often used as count (as the plural –s suffix suggests).

Other common noncount nouns used as count in Singapore English include markings (e.g. As an English teacher, I have lots of markings to do), junks, jargons, terminologies, and slangs.

Worse, Worst

The superlative worst above is wrong (Straits Times Life! supplement, 19 February 2011).  Instead, the comparative worse was needed here since the writer meant that there was no time ‘more bad’ than that referred to in the article.

Perhaps there is a phonological explanation for the above: worst ends in the consonant cluster /st/, and since the following word begins in /t/, the writer would probably have dropped the first /t/ in speech, and allowed this to influence his spelling. 

The deletion of /d/ and /t/ in rapid speech is in fact very common, even among BBC announcers; see, for example, David Deterding’s article.

Subject–Verb Agreement and Inversion

The verb comes above is wrong (Straits Times Life supplement, 22 January 2011). The writer probably assumed that the singular noun consumption was the subject of the sentence, but it is in fact the plural noun emissions.

This is because the sentence has an inverted order Adverbial + Verb + Subject, whereas a normal SVA structure would give us Carbon emissions come with low fuel consumption.

A/An

In Singapore schools we are often taught to use the indefinite article an before words beginning in vowels, and a elsewhere. However, many teachers seem unaware that this rule applies at a phonological level and not an orthographic one — in other words, it applies to sounds, not spelling.

This misunderstanding of the rule has probably led to the error in the caption above (Straits Times online, 14 February 2011): a NTU Linguistics student ought to be an NTU ..., because NTU begins in a vowel sound, /e/.

Keep

In Singapore English the verb keep has the meaning of ‘to put away’ — as was obviously intended in the excerpt above.

In Standard English, however, keep describes a state and not an action; and, as noted by Adam Brown in his excellent Singapore English in a Nutshell, it is very often synonymous with possess, remain or retain.

Marketing

In Standard English, the term marketing refers to ‘the activity of deciding how to advertise a product, what price to charge for it etc, or the type of job in which you do this’.

In Singapore, as the above article (Sunday Times Lifestyle, 28 November 2010) interestingly shows, marketing is used to mean both that and the activity of shopping for groceries.  The latter meaning is in fact also old-fashioned American English.

Young

For some mysterious reason, the Straits Times seems never to be able to handle the collective nouns the young and youth.  Both expressions refer to young people considered as a group, and are grammatically plural.  Hence, make it Young Prefer Newspapers.

Hedge

What, exactly, is a slight change in venue? Getting people to move from the left side of the room to the right, perhaps? (No, it was a complete change, from one lecture theatre to another.)

The use of slight above is an example of a hedge, i.e. ‘a mitigating device used to lessen the impact of an utterance’.  Using it probably made the writer feel there was no need for an apology.

Ellipsis

The verb give is wrong; it should have been giving (Straits Times, 27 November 2010). 

This is because the final clause shares an auxiliary verb with the preceding one, and since it is understood it may be omitted (or ellipted): he is not heeding her words and he (is) not giving in to his grief.

Sentence Construction

The above sign would be improved by the insertion of a definite article before elderly:

This restroom is for people with disabilities and the elderly.

This would make it clear that the restroom is for (i) people with disabilities, and (ii) the elderly.  The definite article would help mark the start of a new, separate noun phrase, so that elderly would not be construed as being part of the postmodifier of the head noun people.  Of course, we might also choose to repeat the preposition (i.e. for the elderly), but perhaps an even clearer way of wording the notice would be:

This restroom is for the elderly and people with disabilities.

Articles

The noun phrase a elephant in the cartoon above (19 November 2010) looks like an error arising out of ignorance. However, a more plausible explanation is that the cartoonist had merely been very careless. As an amateur calligrapher myself I know all too well how easy it is to misspell even the simplest of words — and even one’s own name! — when writing (and typesetting) a piece very slowly and deliberately by hand, especially in capital letters.

Commas

The second sentence (Sunday Times, 21 November 2010) might have been punctuated better as follows:

They are the first, and only, women to date to break into these two male-dominated elite frontline combat units.

Apostrophes

This sign, spotted in a supermarket in Singapore called Giant, is perfectly punctuated (the apostrophe applies, in each case, after the plural forms children, ladies and men have been derived).  In the UK, where I lived for eight years as a student, such a sign would almost certainly have been mispunctuated.

Phonics by Kelly Chopard

The above is a description of a phonics course. As can be seen from the title and body text, the instructor suggests that the pronunciation of phonics as /ˈfəʊnɪks/ is Singaporean and wrong.

Well, here’s an opinion from somebody who knows better — Professor John Wells, possibly the world’s foremost authority on English pronunciation, and writer of the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD).

Below is his entry for phonic. (The ~s means that, in terms of pronunciation, phonics differs only in that one detail from the headword, phonic.)

Unsurprisingly he prioritizes the more common pronunciation, /ˈfɒnɪks/, but also lists /ˈfəʊnɪks/ as a variant for British Received Pronunciation (RP). The same pattern is observed in the General American pronunciations, given after ||.

The fact that /ˈfəʊnɪks/ is not prioritized does not mean it is non-standard. In the LPD, non-standard (i.e. non-RP) pronunciations are marked §, as we can see in the following discussion of /wɪθ/ in Britain:

It is unclear on what basis (apart from irrational prejudice) Kelly Chopard believes that /ˈfəʊnɪks/ is a Singaporean, hence undesirable, pronunciation worthy of ridicule, when for millions of British and American speakers it is perfectly acceptable.

It is also interesting to note that she labels this pronunciation as ‘Singlish’, a usually dismissive term for colloquial Singapore English. However, one should point out that this term refers not so much to the Singapore accent as to other features such as lexis and syntax.

Indeed, the instructor’s misuse of linguistic terms, obvious misunderstanding of issues, and stilted English should make any knowledgeable reader question her credentials.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Spelling

An interesting spelling error in a BBC headline today (8 November 2010): Aborigenes should, of course, be Aborigines.  One wonders if the headline writer, it not merely careless, was thinking of Classical Greek names (e.g. Diogenes) when she or he typed this.

Persephone

This is from the official English As It Is Broken website. 

The anglicized pronunciation of the Classical Greek name Persephone is /pɜːˈsefəni/.  Interestingly, the answer respells the second syllable as SAF rather than SEF, suggesting that for most Singaporean speakers the vowels /e/ and /æ/ are merged. 

It also shows that so-called phonetic respelling is an often maddeningly inexact way of indicating pronunciation, since different readers will assign different sounds to the same letters and to combinations thereof.  In fact, I suspect that most Singaporean readers would be baffled to learn that FUH is supposed to give /fə/ rather than /fu:/.

Ambiguous Headline

This headline (Straits Times web, 6 November 2010) is probably baffling to the reader, until she or he works out that police is not a noun but a verb.

Because headlines need to be brief, words that are understood or recoverable from context are usually omitted.  Function words are usually the first casualties, such as the underlined definite article: Peer pressure to police the deal.

Ambiguity

The headline above (Straits Times web, 20 October 2009) is unintentionally ambiguous and amusing.

The noun phrase ageing panel is intended to mean ‘panel that works on issues involving ageing’ (ageing is a noun here), but arguably the more obvious and natural reading would be ‘panel of ageing members’ (ageing as adjective).

Past Perfect

In the article above, the writer recounts — in the past tense, naturally enough — her maiden experience at a casino.

The use of the simple past in the last sentence, however, is non-standard: since the realization that she had ‘had enough’ took place before her suggestion to H that they leave, she should have used the past perfect: I had had enough of the casino.

Verbal

The word verbal is often imprecise in meaning. Most people use it to mean ‘spoken’ or ‘oral’, so a verbal agreement is one that is spoken and not written down.

Pedants, however, insist that technically it means ‘involving words’ — that is, it may be spoken or written. This broader meaning of verbal may be usefully contrasted with non-verbal, for example a nod to indicate ‘yes’.

Good Winds

I don’t know Portuguese, but I do know enough to work out that bom vento is singular; hence a more accurate translation of the highlighted phrase would be ‘house of good wind’ rather than ‘good winds’, as in the article above (a restaurant review). Presumably, in Portuguese the plural would be bons ventos.

Perhaps the name is in Kristang, the Portuguese-based creole?

Scruffle

There is no such word in English as scruffle; make it scuffle. As a verb, scuffle means ‘to have a short fight that is not very violent’ (Longman).

Speakers sometimes inadvertently blend words when they cannot remember them accurately or are not careful. I had a university lecturer who said she once referred to somebody as portulent, when she had meant to say either corpulent or portly — but not both at the same time.