Attitudes towards the dialect of English spoken in Singapore vary from shame and contempt to pride and admiration. In these posts I’ve tried to convey an attitude of respect even while analyzing what I consider to be mistakes.
Singlish:
“You need to go toilet? Okay, wear your shoe first.”
English:
“You need to go to the toilet? Okay, put on your shoes first.”
‘Wear’ is really not the same as ‘put on’, if you ask me.
Oh, and the whole reason this conversation happens is that kids don’t wear shoes inside schools and enrichment centres, much like nobody wears shoes inside houses here.
Singlish:
“Do you like horror movies?”
“I don’t like.”
The object is obvious, therefore there’s no need to express it.
Sometimes you even get subject dropping, too:
“Do you like horror movies?”
“Don’t like.”
English:
“Do you like horror movies?”
“No, I don’t like them.”
English (more concise alternative):
“Do you like horror movies?”
“No, I don’t.”
Here’s a rare case where English is actually more efficient than Singlish. Singlish needs at least two words, while English, arguably, only needs one:
“Do you like horror movies?”
“Nope.”
This emphasis on repeating the verb in the question comes from Chinese. There’s no universal word for ‘no’ in Chinese, though sometimes you can sensibly answer questions with “not be”, which gives the sense of “whatever you just said is not the case”.
Common messages relating to business hours are often distorted here in Singapore.
Sometimes the sign says ‘business hours’, sometimes it says ‘operating hours’, sometimes it says ‘operation hours’, sometimes it says ‘opening hours’. I don’t think I’ve ever seen ‘open hours’ but that would be bad, too.
I’ve had native speakers say ‘operating hours’ isn’t so bad, but I think it sounds almost as much like a hospital as ‘operation hours’. I think ‘hours’ should suffice, but ‘business hours’ is probably better.
‘Hours of operation’ is okay, I guess, though it sounds a bit formal, or as if it only applies to something automated. It would be weird for a knitting store to have ‘hours of operation’, no? Sounds like a bank or an ATM vestibule.
There’s a restaurant we like (Song Fa Bak Kut Teh) on the sidewalk across from The Central. I think it says that it is “Closed on every Monday.” Gah. (This message is especially frustrating if you’re standing in front of it on a Monday and you want to eat Bak Kut Teh.)
Today I saw a sign that says ‘opens daily’. Please, no.
I can’t really think why someone who doesn’t already know would care about the subtle yet vast difference in between ‘open daily’ and ‘opens daily’. How do you sell someone on the idea that this matters? All they want is to label something that’s already pretty obvious: the times when you can do business with them. Even if the text on the door just said “Monday to Friday 9–5” and nothing more, people would understand. So if they say “Operation Hours Monday to Friday 9–5”, there’s really no harm done, right? Right?
In Singapore, the answer to a question will often be “I also don’t know.” The implication is that the asker doesn’t know and that the answerer is thus the second person who doesn’t know.
We Americans don’t say ‘also’ in English when we don’t know unless at least one person has already failed to answer the question.
In Singapore:
“Where can I get some good Italian food?” asked Amelia.
“I also don’t know,” said Bob.
In the US:
“Where can I get some good Italian food?” asked Amelia.
“I don’t know,” said Bob.
“I also don’t know,” said Cindy.
Cindy is the second person to say the phrase “I don’t know.” The word ‘also’ is just there to emphasize the echo. But probably Cindy wouldn’t even use ‘also’. She’d probably say “me neither” or “I don’t know either.”
Today at Parkway Parade I saw a sign on a cosmetics store that said “powerful-strength line-reducing concentrate”.
I read it as an advertisement for a reducer of ‘strength lines’ and momentarily wondered what a ‘strength line’ was and why it was bad. Then I realized there was a hyphen. The advertisement was for something that reduces lines (i.e., wrinkles). If you write ‘powerful’, though, you don’t need the word ‘strength’.
This strikes me as a very Singlish bit of syntax, though the company that makes this bizarrely named product is American.
In Singapore I keep hearing people here say things like “I like the red-color one.” They should just say “I like the red one,” because ‘red’ is already a color, same way ‘powerful’ is already a strength.
I also hear ‘large size’. The phrase ‘medium size’ makes sense, because all kinds of things can be medium in ways that have nothing to do with size. Things can be medium temperature, or medium cooked, etc. But ‘large’ is always a size, so we don’t say “I would like a large-size coffee, please.” Sometimes we say “I need a size large,” though probably not “I need a size large t-shirt.”
Of course, it’s not just Singlish that is subject to redundancy: don’t we all say ‘ATM machine’ and ‘PIN number’?
And Kiehls wasn’t using Singlish. I just thought they were.
