The Daily Brunei Resources

I haven't done a Brunei book review for quite a while. I thought I will do one on the many books that have arrived over the last couple of months. This book 'Language Use and Language Change in Brunei Darussalam' I thought was particularly interesting to people who study languages in Brunei. We take our languages for granted but apparently according to language researches, our beloved country despite being small both in terms of size and population, has a remarkable variety of linguistic diversity that it provides and I quote '.. a veritable laboratory for linguists in the fields of Austronesian lingustics, bilingual studies, and sociolingusitic studies, particularly those dealing with language shift.. ' There you go, another hidden treasure in Brunei. The book contained 19 research papers some of them written by our own researchers at UBD including Datin Hajah Rosnah Haji Ramly, Fatimah Awg Chuchu and Hajah Sumijah Alias but the majority of them are written by non-...

I was watcing Juara Lagu on TV3 last night when the presenter reminded that the word 'kugiran' is actually a made up word - kumpulan gitar rancak thus the first syllables of the three words making up kugiran. That reminded me when I first heard of the word many years ago about the days of the Beatles who spearheaded the boys band and in the Malay world, we had many other 'kugirans' following suit. Though honestly I cannot recall a single name now. Made up words are interesting. Indonesians to me are masters of this. I remembered ABRI which stands for Angkatan Bersenjata Republik Indonesia and DEPLU - Departemen Luar Negara. When I was in Surabaya, we were taken to one of their tourist attractions called 'Monkasel'. It is actually a real Russian submarine which was bought by the Indonesian Navy and saw action when it fought against the Dutch in the Arafura sea battle freeing West Irian from the Dutch. The submarine has now been turned into a monument and 'Mon...