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The Leeter Spiaking Singlish: Book 3: Loanwords


S$14.95
  • Description
  • About the Author
  • Following on the success of his 2017 hit, Spiaking Singlish: A Companion to How Singaporeans Communicate, Gwee Li Sui is back with a series of three “Leeter” books covering the quintessential features of Singlish, Singapore’s unofficial language – written in Singlish!

    In this third volume, we look at where Singlish words come from: “There are England terms like ‘act cute’ and ‘act blur’ whose meanings we tweak, Melayu ones we keep like ‘cabut’ and ‘pakat’, cheena ones we use like ‘cheong hei’ or translate into England like ‘wait long-long’, Tamil words like ‘goondu’ and ‘aiyoh’, distorted Japanese words like ‘bakero’, and so on. Then got phrases made with words from different languages that become something lagi tok kong, such as ‘buay tahan’ and ‘jiak kentang’.

  • Dr Gwee Li Sui is a former academic who now labours in the arts as a poet, writer, editor, literary critic and graphic artist. He wrote Singapore’s first long-form graphic novel, Myth of the Stone, back in 1993, and has five books of verse to date. He has edited numerous literary anthologies, including Singathology: 50 New Works by Celebrated Singaporean Writers (2015).

ISBN: 9789815009651
Cover Type: Paperback
Page Count: 104
Year Published: 2022
Size: 115mm x 180mm