Malaysian Flavours by Lee Su Kim

Author:Lee Su Kim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MPH Group Publishing Sdn Bhd
Published: 2014-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

MALAYSIAN NAMES

35. WHAT’S IN A NAME?

In Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare says,

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.”

I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with the wise ol’ bard on this. English names may smell quite sweet one way or the other but in a country like Malaysia, with its myriad cultures, languages and dialects, you’ve really got to tread very carefully when naming your child. What may sound perfectly fine in your dialect may take on a different hue or meaning in another dialect or language. Things may be quite cosy for the first few years of your child’s life but when he goes to school and meets the whole spectrum of Malaysian society there, that’s when you’ll know whether his name is “childproof” or not.

Children are playful creatures—they love to play with anything and everything, including sounds; if they can play with the sound of someone else’s name, they will. And if they find that they can distort or contort the name to a different sound or a different meaning, they will too. So, if your sweet little angel, whom you named “Soh Ai See” (assuming that your surname is “Soh”) comes running home from school one day with tears in her eyes—it could very well be that the little horrors at school have been mangling her name and are calling her “So Aiksy” or “So I See”.

The Chinese meaning of the name “Ai See” could be a beautiful one; “ai” meaning “love” and “see” meaning “silk”; hence the name could mean “a love as ethereal as silk” or “a silken love” (there are of course other meanings depending on how the words are written in Mandarin). However, when it becomes “So Aiksy”, a combination of English and Malaysian English, it means “She’s Such a Show-off”, and “So I See” is English for ... er ... well ... “So, I See”.

Malaysian Chinese names are at a greater risk than Malay, Indian or Eurasian names. This is because Chinese names comprise three syllables (including the surname) which can be permutated into millions of combinations. An Indian name like Santana or a Malay name like Azizah also comprises three syllables but it’s harder to play on such names as they come in a whole entity ... although Santana could still end up being called Santan (the Malay word for “coconut milk”).

Thus, if your name is “Yong Mo Tuck”, you could find your friends calling you “Yang Botak” (“The Bald One”)! And if your name is as ordinary-sounding as “Seng Ah Song”, some kid might call you “Sing-a-song”! I know a girl, Tan Tse Lee, who was quite happy with her name until she reached Form Six and went to a coed school and got called “Darn Silly” by the darn silly boys there.

A good friend of mine named Kong Beng is affectionately called Goat by his friends. This was because he was nicknamed twice—his friends called him “Kambing” for a while at school, and then a switch from Malay to English, and he ended up with the name “Goat”.

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