Malang di negara ini, kita semua kena beratur belakang orang terlembab!! Orang tak mampu, tak larat belajar bahasa lain penentu kandungan pembelajaran kita. The blind leading the blind!!"
Dan lagi satu :
"The excuse that rural students will lack behind urban ones does not hold water and is the dumbest statekent yet. What country leader represses its own citizens from progressing by lowering the standards for others to catch up? Wouldn't it be wiser to put extra effort into the rural schools to help them instead of retarding the urban ones"Fikir-fikirkanlah.
Tapi saya musykil ada tak poll dibuat untuk tengok pandangan rakyat Malaysia khususnya ibubapa terhadap PPSMI ni?Setakat ni aku jumpa yang dekat blog Tun Mahathir, dan setakat ni 77% bantah pemansuhan PPSMI dan 23% sokong dari total 19606 voters. Tapi maybe poll tu bias sebab kat blog Tun M, so kalau ada dari sumber lain I would love to know.
Ooops and terjumpa plak poll kat forum Low Yat, dan soalannya berbunyi "PPSMI poll. English in math n science, Serious woo n no racist please (Serious Talk)" hehe. Poll ni ditujukan kepada student2 yang melalui PPSMI.
Keputusan : (disebabkan isu ini mainly orang Melayu yang bising so saya pastekan result untuk kategori Malay)
Yes 88%[22 voters], No 12%[3 voters]
But then again ni forum Low Yat so mungkin budak2 yang frequent forum ni adalah penduduk KL so bias la kot. Dan bilangan sample yang kecil menjadikan poll ini tidak representative. Tapi nak letak gak haha.
So any other polls?
Majulah Malaysia.
Salamat.
The Ottomans started with a mortar barrage..
..which immediately destroyed my arty pieces.
Prussian troops marching to the front.
Fueur!!
Prussian cavalry charging the enemy's position.
I went to a fascinating seminar some time back at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, given by Dr Uri Tadmor on the subject of Malay and Indonesian loanwords. Loanwords, by their nature, can often be strong evidence of sustained cultural interaction — ephemeral contact is often not enough to stimulate widespread borrowing — but they can do more than allow us the rather facile conclusion that, for example, Persians and Indians were, once upon a time, in contact with Malays. What Tadmor was really concerned with was to showcase the potential of linguistics, in particular the study of loanwords, for investigating the social history of a region, sometimes even against the grain of received (or convenient) wisdom.
One could look at the type of words that are borrowed: in particular, what Tadmor called their ’semantic fields’, which is to say, the general intended function of these words, such as ‘religion’, ‘clothing’ or ‘law’. This can say a lot about what exactly Indians or Persians were doing in Malaysia; for example, one might draw conclusions about the fact that many Persian words in Malay are to do with important cultural practices, like marriage, which is kahwin in Malay and kawin in Persian. Tadmor points out that in most languages, just as you would expect, words least likely to be borrowed are those from semantic fields governing qualities common to all human beings: words of spatial relations, movement, sense perceptions, quantity. Yet even at this basic level, social factors can prevail. Take quantity. The Malay-Indonesian word for ‘three’, tiga, is from the Sanskrit trika, which means ‘trinity’. One might rightly, Tadmor says, wonder why Malay-Indonesian would need to borrow a word for such a basic number, when there already existed telu, the Javanese and Old Malay word for ‘three’. His rather amusing conjecture, which I find entertaining enough to pass on with a pinch of salt, is that the Sanskrit word was poached in cultural embarrassment. The word telu sounds uncomfortably similar to the Malay word telur, which means ‘egg’, but which Tadmor points out was also a common euphemism for ‘testicles’. One, two, testicle! Better to bung in the more lofty Sanskrit when speaking to important people. And apparently, it stuck. There’s a huge amount of Sanskrit in Malay, including such basic words as those for ‘head’, ‘light’, ‘because’, ‘all’ and ‘when’.
But one could also look at how a word gets imported, and what morphological changes occur along the way. Note how the unvoiced consonant in the Sanskrit trika, the hard ‘k’, has become the voiced consonant, the ‘g’, in Malay tiga. Tadmor says that this form of morphological change very commonly takes place when Indo-Aryan words (Sanskrit) are imported into Dravidian languages; for example, Tamil. Can it be, then, that Sanskrit words are being relayed into Malay -Indonesianthrough South Indians? Sure enough, there’s an astounding number of Dravidian-origin loanwords in Malay. To name just a few: Tamil’s kappal for Malay’s kapal, or ’ship’; Tamil’s taman for Malay’s teman, or ‘friend’; Tamil’s katai for Malay’s kedai, or ’shop/market’. Most interestingly, the word for ’shop’ in Indonesian is not kedai but toko, which is a word of Hokkien Chinese derivation — perhaps giving some indication of the early social landscape in Malayan and Indonesian towns and cities, and in particular, who were the ones keeping shops. Finally, through some pretty intense morphological analysis, Tadmor shows that most words of Arabic origin in Malay and Indonesian were ultimately borrowed via Persian — even, I believe, aspects of Jawi, the Arabic written script adapted for Malay.
One can also, metaphorically speaking, carbon date loanwords; that is to say, get some sense of approximately when a given foreign word entered a language. For example, there seems to be good evidence suggesting that Dravidian loanwords in the Malay Archipelago can be traced back to Old Tamil, which scholars date variously between 300 BC and 700 CE. An example would be the Malay word nelayan, for ‘fisherman’; according to Tadmor, this comes from a Tamil word ulayyan [sic?] that no Tamil speaker today would recognize, because it’s been out of use for centuries and is only found today in ancient Sangam period literature. This suggests that there must have been Dravidian, specifically Tamil seafarers in the Malay Archipelago more than a thousand years ago.
And it seems it wasn’t only Tamils living on the peninsula a thousand years ago. Tadmor intimated that this aspect of Austronesian linguistics is almost entirely understudied: Malay contains an astounding number of Khmer loanwords. Some of these words have been borrowed through Thai; for example, the word for ‘census’, which is bonci in Khmer, banchii in Thai, and banci in Malay. Some of these words are the same in all three languages: the word for ‘recognize’ or ‘remember’ is cam in Khmer, Thai and Malay. But some Malay words are different enough from their Thai or Khmer versions that we might wonder whether they were really so related: the word for ‘candle’, for example, is thien in Khmer and thian in Thai, but dian in Malay. And here’s where the carbon dating comes in: the present Khmer form of ‘candle’ is thien, but its form in Old Angkorian Khmer (roughly, 9th century to 13th century) is exactly the same as that of present day Malay: dian.
I do think all this, conjectural and thin in the way only archaeology can be and still maintain its academic reputation, is nonetheless rather interesting in particular for Malaysia, whose official history maintains a studious, almost desperate disinterest in pre-Islamic history of the peninsula. This is, I think, a product of some deep insecurities about the place of Malay and the Malays in history, and the cultural defensiveness that comes with such complexes; it’s a set of concerns that I think Indonesia doesn’t share to quite the same extent. But in the face of the unmistakable traces of Ancient Khmer, Old Tamil, Urdu, Sanskrit and a distinctly Persianized Arabic in the very language that you utter your denials of pre-Islamic-Malay history in — this is masterful hypocrisy. Also, failing to acknowledge the deeply porous character of the Malay language (nearly a third of the Malay-Indonesian language is loaned) might blind us to the way in which two of the most salient ’semantic field’ vacuums in Malaysia, over the last century, have been and are still today being filled by non-Malay terms: science and politics. No prizes for guessing what the words for those in Malay are: sains and, yes, politik.
Amman, Sunday - A big gunfight broke out between the forces loyal to the warlord Abdullah Bey and the Jungle Squad in the mountains northwest of Amman, yesterday. The Jungle Squad, working on information obtained from torturing the locals, finally managed to find and encircle Abdullah Bey's field command post. The result of the 1 1/2 hour battle is total defeat for Abdulla Bey, where he along with his loyal fighters were taken prisoner. Here are some details about the battle.
Prisoners of War
With Lt Ramsy 
With S Sgt Izham
With Lt Sameeh of the Jungle Squad. Notice the hit around Abdulla Bey's right mandible
Moments before the execution of Lt Ramsy
“I Speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to My Horse” -Charles V, king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor, 1500–58
