Malay Words Research Articles

Reducing the Cognitive Complexity in Reading the Arabic Script of Written Malay via Diacritics

Malay, the national language of Malaysia, is written in two distinct scripts: the Arabic script and the Romanised script. The Arabic script of written Malay is relatively more cognitively complex (Salehuddin, 2012); making it today the less preferred script of written Malay in comparison to Romanised script. Salehuddin (2013) proposed the introduction of the Arabic vowel diacritics into the Arabic script of written Malay to reduce its cognitive complexity. Hence, this paper presents results of an experiment using DMDX as a tool to investigate the accuracy of reading Malay words written in Arabic script with and without diacritics.

Analysis of Malay word structure by pre-service special education teachers: foundation-level knowledge for remedial instruction

Pre-service special educators' Malay word structure knowledge was assessed through their analysis of words. A total of 69 participants analysed a vocabulary list based on a set of criteria formulated from the Malay language word structure. Results indicated that they were able to count syllables and phonemes, and identify types of affixations; however, they were unable to identify syllabic structures and word categories accurately. The morphemic and phonetic structure of words also had a moderating effect on their analysis of syllabic structures. The results implied that pre-service teachers of a transparent language still needed explicit instruction in grapheme–phoneme skills, phonic skills, morphological structure and word categories, but less instruction on phonological structure.

Bedbugs and Grasshoppers: Translation, Myth and the Becoming of the Nation‐State

AbstractHow is literally, a nation translated? This paper looks at translation practices as historical process and practice rather than submitting them to causal explanations with respect to the constitution of the nation‐state. It takes as its starting point, two contemporary Malay words negeri (province, state) and negara (country, nation‐state) and how they once had opposing definitions. Working with over three hundred years of dictionaries and lexicons, mainly English‐Malay dictionaries, the words negeri and negara were translated and defined very differently from current dictionaries – nor are they clarified today. What then happened to these words and how were they understood and translated over time, and in what possible context within the language of post‐colonial nation‐state formation? What do the processes of translation offer or convey that disrupts the singularity of nations and nationalism? Writings on translation do not necessarily shed any further clarity but they offer a space in which we can think about translating practices and what they enact in the narrative of the nation.

Lexicon Splitting In Lexical Disambiguation For Malay Morphological Analysis And Stemming

Lexical ambiguity is one of the problems faced by morphological analyser and stemmer. It is caused by ambiguous word form like homonym, which could direct the tools to produce incorrect output. Thus a method that can resolve ambiguity may improve the performance of such tools. Malay word affixation differentiates between monosyllable and multisyllable word. A disambiguation method is proposed for tools that use lexicon for analysis and stemming, by splitting the lexicon into monosyllable and multisyllable words. We found that this feature could help to resolve ambiguity involving monosyllable words, improve language’s exception handling and improve storage lookup.This would be useful for Malay morphological analysis and stemming as this method does not require document-level context analysis of the analysed word.

Current Concepts about Areca Nut Chewing

ABSTRACTThe habit of chewing areca is a habit of great antiquity. The word ‘areca’ is derived from the Malay word adakka (areca nut) or from adakeya, the Indian equivalent. Arecoline, the principal alkaloid in areca nut, acts as an agonist primarily at muscarinic acetylcholine receptors and stimulates the central and autonomic nervous system. This leads to subjective effects of increased well-being, alertness and stamina. It is known to improve concentration and relaxation, with other reported effects including lifting of mood, cariostatic property and also exerts a direct antimicrobial effect against bacteria. Arecaidine may have anxiolytic properties through inhibition of gamma-amino butyric acid (GABA) reuptake.Despite these general effects, the adverse effects have outweighed them. Betal quid chewing is one of the major risk factors of hepatocarcinoma, oropharyngeal and esophagus cancers. Arecoline, the main areca alkaloid of the betel nut, is reported to have cytotoxic, genotoxic and mutagenic effects in various cells. It shows strong correlation to the incidence of oral submucosal fibrosis, leukoplakia and oral cancer, and has also been found to impose toxic manifestations in immune, hepatic and other defense systems of the recipient.How to cite this articleChandak RM, Chandak MG, Rawlani SM. Current Concepts about Areca Nut Chewing. J Contemp Dent 2013;3(2):78-81.

Word familiarity and lexical change: The case of Sarawak Malay Dialect

This preliminary study looks at the familiarity rating of words in Sarawak Malay Dialect (SMD). Although familiarity ratings of language items are usually utilised in psycholinguistic research, they can be very useful for studies in the area of language change. The aim of this study is twofold: (1) to compare the perceptive familiarity rating of Sarawak Malay words; and (2) to document Sarawak Malay words that are undergoing lexical change. Fifty SMD words were used in this study consisting of those with meanings that can be considered as medium to high in frequency for everyday speech. Questionnaires were designed using a 5-point Likert-type scale to rate word familiarity and distributed to 15 participants who were native SMD speakers between the ages of 20 and 25. Across word items, more than one third were found to be rated as less familiar and unknown and thus were not actively used in daily conversations. There were also a number of words perceived as familiar to highly familiar but were not widely used in everyday speech. Evidently, it is crucial to document and preserve these SMD words as they are fast becoming passive vocabulary for the young and may eventually be lost in their lexicon.

Case Studies in Amok?

“Amok” or “running amok” is derived from the Malay word “mengamok,” meaning to make a furious and desperate charge (Saint Martin, 1999). Captain James Cook, a British explorer, is given credit for ...

Emotion and Explicit Verbal Memory: Evidence Using Malay Lexicon

The dichotomy of emotional system and cognitive system has been debated for centuries. As a result, there is still much to know about the effects of emotions on memory. In two experiments, emotion was manipulated to investigate its effect on recall and recognition of words. Experiment 1 used a recognition test and experiment 2 used a free recall test. Emotion was manipulated in word stimuli: positive words, negative words and neutral words (baseline condition). Malay words were used as the verbal stimuli. The valences of the words were taken from ANEW. Results revealed that memory was better on the recognition test than recall test. Emotion had a significant effect on memory performance where both positive and negative emotions improved memory when compared to the baseline condition. The implication is that Malay words elicit a different result on explicit memory when emotional content of the words was manipulated.

Popular Sites of Prayer, Transoceanic Migration, and Cultural Diversity: Exploring the significance ofkeramatin Southeast Asia

AbstractKeramatis the Malay word for the graves of notable figures which are popular sites of prayer and dot the social and physical landscapes of much of Muslim Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region as a whole. The term refers to both people as well as their burial sites. Historically,keramatdrew people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. While the venerated dead also came from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, histories, and faiths, they were usually Muslim and frequently Hadrami (from the Hadramaut region in Yemen). In this paper, I viewkeramatas a significant site of social and cultural diversity. The study ofkeramat, and the transoceanic movement of the people and faith to which it is linked, may shed further light on the cultural interaction that has historically characterized the region. At the same time, the permissibility of the veneration of graves constitutes a terrain that has long been contested by Muslim scholars. As a result, the fate of this popular practice may offer insights into the complex process of Islamization in the region which began around 700 years ago. I explore two questions in particular. First, in what ways dokeramatembody cultural diversity? Secondly, where dokeramatstand in relation to state- and organization-driven Islam?

Malay Language Speech Recogniser with Hybrid Hidden Markov Model and Artificial Neural Network(HMM/ANN)

There are many artificial intelligence approaches used in the development of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), and hybrid approach is one of them. The common hybrid method in speech recognition is the combination of Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The hybrid HMM/ANN is able to combine the strength of HMM in sequential modeling structure and ANN in pattern classification. Thus, this paper proposed a speaker independent and continuous Malay language speech recogniser by using the hybrid HMM/ANN method. In addition to that, this paper presents a study on Standard Malay's phonetic and phonology to help in the recognition of Malay words. The CSLU toolkit is utilized for building the recogniser, and the experimental results showed that the proposed HMM/ANN model outperformed the conventional HMM model. The performances of the recognisers are measured in term of word accuracy and sentence accuracy.

Acquisition of Malay word recognition skills: lessons from low-progress early readers

Malay is a consistent alphabetic orthography with complex syllable structures. The focus of this research was to investigate word recognition performance in order to inform reading interventions for low-progress early readers. Forty-six Grade 1 students were sampled and 11 were identified as low-progress readers. The results indicated that both syllable awareness and phoneme blending were significant predictors of word recognition, suggesting that both syllable and phonemic grain-sizes are important in Malay word recognition. Item analysis revealed a hierarchical pattern of difficulty based on the syllable and the phonic structure of the words. Error analysis identified the sources of errors to be errors due to inefficient syllable segmentation, oversimplification of syllables, insufficient grapheme-phoneme knowledge and inefficient phonemic code assembly. Evidence also suggests that direct instruction in syllable segmentation, phonemic awareness and grapheme-phoneme correspondence is necessary for low-progress readers to acquire word recognition skills. Finally, a logical sequence to teach grapheme-phoneme decoding in Malay is suggested.

The Malay Lexicon Project: A database of lexical statistics for 9,592 words

Malay, a language spoken by 250 million people, has a shallow alphabetic orthography, simple syllable structures, and transparent affixation--characteristics that contrast sharply with those of English. In the present article, we first compare the letter-phoneme and letter-syllable ratios for a sample of alphabetic orthographies to highlight the importance of separating language-specific from language-universal reading processes. Then, in order to develop a better understanding of word recognition in orthographies with more consistent mappings to phonology than English, we compiled a database of lexical variables (letter length, syllable length, phoneme length, morpheme length, word frequency, orthographic and phonological neighborhood sizes, and orthographic and phonological Levenshtein distances) for 9,592 Malay words. Separate hierarchical regression analyses for Malay and English revealed how the consistency of orthography-phonology mappings selectively modulates the effects of different lexical variables on lexical decision and speeded pronunciation performance. The database of lexical and behavioral measures for Malay is available at http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

Obituary: Amin Sweeney

Obituary:Amin Sweeney Jan van der Putten (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The first message I received when I switched on my handphone upon leaving the plane in the Netherlands last November read 'Amin is dead'. Prof. Muhammad Amin Sweeney passed away quite unexpectedly on 13 November 13, 2010, while finishing a renovation job at his much beloved cottage in Cisarua, where he enjoyed his two favourite hobbies: gardening and bird watching. An inveterate teller of hilarious stories and outrageous jokes, Amin was a man of many virtues and vices, talents and skills, and you always knew when he was around. To say that Amin was unconventional would be a silly understatement: he was a man who combined a Catholic past with a Muslim present, who tried to integrate his Malaysian citizenship with his Irish-anti-British background and his life in Jakarta while claiming Kelantanese as his primary language. He came to Malaya at the end of the 1950s, after dropping out of secondary school, when he was drafted to counter the Communist insurgency in this British domain. But, he would state that the only action he carried out was having a cup of tea with a few captured insurgents. He was a rabble-rouser who was always looking for boundaries so that he could cross them, setting a possible precedent for others to follow. After his bloodless encounter with the friendly communists, he taught English to Malay soldiers and spent time with local people all over the Peninsula, always eager to communicate with them and study their cultures. He was firmly hooked and wanted to know more, so he went back to London to study at the [End Page 103] School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. Soon he decided that the scholars there could not teach him much as they were epigones of the colonial system who communicated only with servants, the royal elite and subordinate officers in the military. Amin despised these people and would always make fun of their accents when uttering some Malay words. 'Boy, kasi tea banyak tebal', was one of his stock phrases to refer to them. As he surpassed them in his command and knowledge of the Malay language, Amin was asked to set his own exams, which he passed with flying colours, earning a first-class honours degree in 1967. For his subsequent PhD research he met with a Dutch scholar whom he very much respected for his knowledge and dedication to his field of study: Professor C. Hooykaas. Amin had fond memories of his sessions at Hooykaas' house outside London and the letters they exchanged while Amin was doing his fieldwork research in Kelantan on wayang kulit. Amin received his PhD in 1970 and in the same year was appointed lecturer at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, where he would stay for seven years. Eventually he moved to California to take up a position in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1999. By no means did his retirement mean he would sit still watching birds in the garden. In Jakarta, where he moved after leaving California, there was hardly a garden or any birds, so he bought the house in Cisarua. But Amin also was not planning on retiring just yet from the field so dear to him. To many he will be remembered primarily for his work on oral traditions in the Malay world, represented in his books on the wayang kulit of Kelantan (both 1972), Tok Selampit (1995), his Authors and Audiences (1980) and A Full Hearing (1987). But Amin did not like to put easy labels on his works. He did not agree with a simple boundary between written and oral traditions or a separation between traditional and modern literature. One of the threads that can be discerned in all his writing is an awareness of the imposition of one's foreign values and notions about cultural practices upon the tradition one is studying. While acknowledging R. O. Winstedt's scholarship and contributions, with great erudition and verve he dissected Winstedt's studies on...

Formal Properties and Characteristics of Malay Rhythmic Reduplication

Reduplication is a process of Malay word formation. Generally it can be divided into full, partial and rhythmic reduplication. Another set is the undefined group which is called free-form reduplication. Lexically, the rhythmic reduplication is systematically formed as some of its processes had been able to be identified. The semantical aspect of reduplication is to create ‘multiplicity’, ‘repetition’, ‘concentration’ and ‘variety’. Of these, the rhythmic reduplication is specialized with the latter. Functionally, rhythmic reduplication tends to diversify a set where others may just perform multiplication. Our analysis shows that rhythmic reduplication does exist with purpose. Its systematic formation and usage shows that Malay language had its own device to classify things which rigorously describe different sets of object or their properties.

Stemming Malay Text and Its Application in Automatic Text Categorization

In Malay language, there are no conjugations and declensions and affixes have important grammatical functions. In Malay, the same word may function as a noun, an adjective, an adverb, or, a verb, depending on its position in the sentence. Although extensively simple root words are used in informal conversations, it is essential to use the precise words in formal speech or written texts. In Malay, to make sentences clear, derivative words are used. Derivation is achieved mainly by the use of affixes. There are approximately a hundred possible derivative forms of a root word in written language of the educated Malay. Therefore, the composition of Malay words may be complicated. Although there are several types of stemming algorithms available for text processing in English and some other languages, they cannot be used to overcome the difficulties in Malay word stemming. Stemming is the process of reducing various words to their root forms in order to improve the effectiveness of text processing in information systems. It is essential to avoid both over-stemming and under-stemming errors. We have developed a new Malay stemmer (stemming algorithm) for removing inflectional and derivational affixes. Our stemmer uses a set of affix rules and two types of dictionaries: a root-word dictionary and a derivative-word dictionary. The use of set of rules is aimed at reducing the occurrence of under-stemming errors, while that of the dictionaries is believed to reduce the occurrence of over-stemming errors. We performed an experiment to evaluate the application of our stemmer in text mining software. For the experiment, text data used were actual web pages collected from the World Wide Web to demonstrate the effectiveness of our Malay stemming algorithm. The experimental results showed that our stemmer can effectively increase the precision of the extracted Boolean expressions for text categorization.

From The Shrimp People

From The Shrimp People Rex Shelley (bio) "Don't look now, but there's that old bloke from Singapore," Ray muttered under his breath just before he raised the glass of Swan to his lips. Curious to see a fellow Singaporean face, I made the fatal mistake. With my reactions slowed down by two glasses, I looked over Ray's shoulder. I saw him at once. A grey-haired old man with a battered look on his face. Brown skinned, a little wrinkled, badly shaven with an eager gleam in his grey-blue eyes. A rounded, Oriental, Malay sort of nose, high cheekbones, but his eyes and large bone structure did not look Asian. He was thin. Perhaps gaunt. But one could see that, beneath the dried skin, there was once muscle in the old fellow's arms. He caught me looking at him. I had perhaps let my look linger a little too long. He met my eyes, stared unblinking at me for a split second, and the corner of his mouth curled slightly in a smile. He started to move towards me. "He's coming over, Ray," I said. "Oh God." He was with us before Ray could say anything more. "Hey, Ray. Howyer mate?" "All right, and yerself?" "Couldn't be better. Who's your friend?" "Oh, this is Robert. He's from Singapore—" Before Ray could finish speaking, the old fellow interrupted. "I thought I saw a familiar face. Pleased to meet you. I'm Joe. Joe Coombes." He shot out his hand and gave me a firm, friendly grip. "You're Serani, aren't you?" "Yes," I replied, feeling guilty about it for some reason or other. Perhaps it was because I should have recognised him as a fellow Serani at once. Ray chipped in, "What's this Serani?" and Old Joe went into explanations about the Eurasians being called Serani and the derivation from the Malay word Nasarene, meaning Nazareth man, Christian, and all that, which I had heard and trotted out myself a million times. "What's your surname?" The ritual had started. I winced and replied, "Machado." "Oh! You're not from Singapore! You're a Penangite, aren't you?" [End Page 131] "No. I'm a true-blue Singaporean. Don't smoke, and keep hair short. My father was from Penang." "Was he the goalie? Bobby Machado?" "No. Bobby was my uncle." He was away now. I could see his eyes sparkle, and I knew it was coming. He would know them all. He was going to rush into it and enjoy every moment, every memory. He paused for effect. "Let me see now…Your mother must have been a Rodrigues. Didn't Ben Machado marry Bertha?" "No. My mother's name is Beryl." "Of course! Beryl Rodrigues…the one with the big tits. Sorry lah. No offence intended. Just rememberin'…" He laughed, took a gulp of his beer, and continued. I stood there, resigned. I realised now why Ray had muttered "Oh God." "Yes. Yes, yes…Bertha married Heng, that bloody rascal. But she was a bit of a flighty thing herself. Ditched the bugger, didn't she?" "Yes, my Auntie Bertha left Uncle Heng." "Uncle Heng? Is that what you called him?" "Yeah…my mother didn't like us using his Chinese name." "Teepical, teepical…," he said in his Singapore-English way. I felt I had to do my bit for politeness' sake. "Are you related to Anthony Coombes, who's with the fire service?" "Yah. That's my good-for-nothing nephew. Joined the Fire Brigade against his parents' advice. Straight after his Senior Cambridge. Silly bugger. Wanted adventure he said, and where did it get him? The only bloody adventure and excitement he had was chasing Malay women down the kampong paths in Geylang. Real bugger for the girls, he was. Chased anything that moved in a sarong. Do you know him?" "No. But I met him once at a wedding." "Let me get you buggers a drink." Ray shot his "Oh God" glance at me while getting drinks distracted Old Joe. But he was back at it as soon as we picked up our fresh, full...

Computer-based speech training for children

A computer-based speech training system has been developed for children. The system is able to perform diagnostics and training in Malay language at both syllable and word level. The system allows children with difficulty in articulating plosive sounds to train with the computer to correct their speech articulation problems. Besides that, the system also provides audio and visual feedback to make the children aware of their errors of articulation. Sixteen Malay monosyllables and 16 bisyllabic Malay words are selected as the stimulus items. All these syllables and words have a plosive consonant-vowel structure (CV or CVCV). The system tests showed that it has the potential to be used in schools, homes and speech therapy clinics.

British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth

British Logwood Extraction from the Mosquitia: The Origin of a Myth

Experiments with a stemming algorithm for Malay words

Stemming is used in information retrieval systems to reduce variant word forms to common roots in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. As in other languages, there is a need for an effective stemming algorithm for the indexing and retrieval of Malay documents. The Malay stemming algorithm developed by Othman is studied and new versions proposed to enhance its performance. The improvements relate to the order in which the dictionary is looked-up, the order in which the morphological rules are applied, and the number of rules. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Experiments with a stemming algorithm for Malay words

Stemming is used in information retrieval systems to reduce variant word forms to common roots in order to improve retrieval effectiveness. As in other languages, there is a need for an effective stemming algorithm for the indexing and retrieval of Malay documents. The Malay stemming algorithm developed by Othman is studied and new versions proposed to enhance its performance. The improvements relate to the order in which the dictionary is looked-up, the order in which the morphological rules are applied, and the number of rules. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.