I really like studying etymology and the origins of words, and I'm interested in the fairly omnivorous nature of English, which has a huge "borrowed" vocabulary. (Random fact: "bugger" is related to "Bulgaria".) So I thought every now and then I'd put up random lists of words English borrows from various languages - well, besides French, German, and Spanish, or I'll exhaust myself from typing. I thought I'd start with Malay, national language of Singapore. Wikipedia already has a partial list , but I thought I'd come up with a list that also included a few other loan words. The obvious ones are words for things that are indigenous to the region - plants (durian, rambutan, bamboo, sago, camphor ), animals (orang-utan, pangolin, cassowary), and cloth ( gingham , sarong). But there's a whole bunch that're less obvious, even to native English speakers from this region: amok . If you asked me to name one English loan word that
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I got a job yeah I got work to do ...
Though we never see you anymore
We hope you've not forgotten
to come back to Singapore
The fires won't stop burning
And no matter how hard we try
It seems we're edging closer
to one thousand PSI
And it seems to me you lived your life
like a candle in the wind
Never staying a moment longer
when the haze set in
And your memory will always haunt us
when the CD sirens wail
Your candles burned out long before
our lungs completely fail ....
we see it we smell it
That is how we know it goes on.
Far across the distance
And spaces between us
It has come to show it goes on
Near, far, wherever we are
We can see that the haze just goes on
Once more we close all our doors
But it still oozes in
And we know it'll go on and on.
Asthma comes just one time
And lasts for a lifetime
And never goes till we're gone
The haze should blow to Java
SBY & Yusuf Kalla
Then they'll know just what's goin' on ...
It's here, that's just what we fear
And we know that the haze will go on
It'll stay forever this way
till the northeast monsoon comes
till then, it goes on and on.