Tuesday, November 18, 2008

talking about languages

contrary to my previous post..i've been very pissed with the current country of my residence for quite some time, but nevertheless......... due to the habit of sleepin early in the morning and getting up late in the noon (no no....please...this is a prettttttty normal cycle of a post graduate student living abroad where orkut and facebook updates run in his or her blood) i was introduced to the world of singapore cinema ( more about it later ) and a few thoughts mingled in my mind.
The four national languages of singapore are chinese, malay, tamil and english. Yea, even i thought that there SHOULD be a Singaporish, but am not a PR or a Citizen to make an amendment and even sitting down and formulating a new language would be tough for the government. But still mr.president i still think u should go ahead and formulate a new language. cause there are instructions and rules all over the country. even wikipedia when searched for singapore shows you a danger board in four languages. every announcemnt is made in four languges.imagine the amount of cost cutting if there is a common language. but yea.. for people to understand it should be a mix of english and chinese and malay and tamil. but if its a mix of all those, a chinese cant understand malay, a malay cant understand tamil and hence all the permutations and combinations.
forget that.
chinese is of many differet dialects and one kind of chinese dialect guy cant understand the other chinese guy's dialect.
even the ads go:
a common room for sharing
chinese female preffered
traditional chinese speaking preffered
modern chinese speaking dont apply.
exactly,for us foriegners all of them look and sound the same and these guys think all indians look alike and all indians are south indians. one of my frnz (a north indian)was even asked if she was a south indian and since she did not want to be seggregated on a direction basis replied she was an indian and is questioned back as to why her nationality is an indian.
helooo singapore...there are hell lot of varied languages in india may be thats why indian govt was thinking logically for once and thus we have a common national language or imagine a sign board like


in india.
by the time you figure out where your languge is you may no longer exist to read it:P