Unspun had the occasion to spend some time at Universiti Malaya Hospital because mum was having an angioplasty (she’s now up and about after a scary 6 hour angioplasty). Bored waiting for her to come out of the cardiac surgery Unspun began to notice the weird signs of the hospital.
This posting is dedicated to Unspun’s Indonesian readers who will immediately see the humor on how Bahasa Melayu is abused by its northern neighbor Malaysia. They may have to take a stab at the meaning though. Warning: Malaysians may not see the joke in all this.
And Unspun’s favorite. It’s a bit fuzzy though:
Unspun 
It’s been always funny to read Melayu term. My fave one is bilik kecemasan. I wonder if Malaysians feel the same when read Bahasa Indonesia one. 😀
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Inbois = (invoice)?, konferen = conference, I think, but wtf is poter? Also I thought /j/ sound (as in discaj) at the end of a word is not permitted by Malay phonotactics. Or is it already changed in Malaysia?
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hahaha…i have to say that bahasa indonesia elicit the same response when we, the Malaysians, read it. It’s an ongoing trend to use ‘Bahasa ala Oxford’ nowadays though this practice totally baffles me since there is a Bahasa Malaysia equivalent for that specific word.
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Yeah, but at least here in Indonesia we try to change the pronunciation to follow Indonesian (well, Malay actually 🙂 ) phonotactics. We don’t absorp “charge” as /carj/, we pronounce it as /cas/, for example. See “cas” entry at Kateglo here: http://www.bahtera.org/kateglo/?mod=dict&action=view&phrase=cas
Words like kolej, discarj are strange for Malay tongue.
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these are some of my friends’ favorite terms when they visited KL
1. kawasan berehat: disini anda boleh istirahat
2.kawasan kemalangan: disini ada mendapat kemalangan (kidding!)
3. kaki tangan sahaja: kepala tidak boleh masuk
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“Rumah sakit korban lelaki” is my favorite 😉
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actually rumah sakit korban lelaki is a joke.. not malaysian term..
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@Wahyu: So is “injak bumi,” I suspect
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Aqua must be my fave! I dont know how its spelled in Malay, but it means transvestite (it’s malaysian slang i think). so when my indonesian friend ordered two bottles of Aqua ( it is normal in indonesia to ask for mineral water by saying ‘aqua’) at a malay resto…. the waiter was not pleased…
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