The Leeter Spiaking Singlish Book 3: Loanwords

Download or read book The Leeter Spiaking Singlish Book 3: Loanwords written by Dr Gwee Li Sui and published by Marshall Cavendish International Asia Pte Ltd. This book was released on 2022-09-15 with total page 75 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the master of Singlish himself! Following on the success of his 2017 hit, Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate, Gwee Li Sui is back with a series of three ‘Leeter’ books covering the quintessential features of Singlish, Singapore’s unofficial language – written in Singlish! In this third volume, we look at where Singlish words come from: ‘There are England terms like ‘act cute’ and ‘act blur’ whose meanings we tweak, Melayu ones we keep like ‘cabut’ and ‘pakat’, cheena ones we use like ‘cheong hei’ or translate into England like ‘wait long-long’, Tamil words like ‘goondu’ and ‘aiyoh’, distorted Japanese words like ‘bakero’, and so on. Then got phrases made with words from different languages that become something lagi tok kong, such as ‘buay tahan’ and ‘jiak kentang’.