TEMENGGOR IT SHOULD BE

I take great pride in the fact that I am from Penang and I speak the Penang Malay dialect fluently (in case you wondered: Penang dialect is the best in the country!) and I speak the formal Bahasa very flueltly also.

Which brings me to my recent work-related assignment to Temenggor Forest Reserve. It must be spelt with a double G (i.e 'gg'). For some strange reason, apparently the Perak state government has sanctioned the spelling of the place with a single 'g' (i.e. Temengor).

This is wrong, obviously. Malaysians spell name places with double Gs always. From TerenGGanu to TemenGGor. These places are spelt as they are pronounced -- we do not say TE-REN-GANU, we say TE-RENG-GANU.

Similarly, we do not say TE-MEN-GOR, we say TE-MENG-GOR.

I have many very dear colleagues and friends who are from Perak itself and no one says TE-MEN (as in the plural of the English word MAN)-GOR.

I suspect the person or group of people who officially sanctioned the spelling TE-MEN-GOR must be the offspring(s) of Indonesian PRs in Malaysia. No one in their right mind speaks Malay the way it is prescribed officially. Malaysians speak Malay with a classy sense of poetry and lilt. Not stiff in the way demanded by the artificiality of the Bahasa Baku format.

(Anyway, just a jibe at Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim for promoting that dubious policy of introducing Bahasa Baku while he was Education Minister -- the man had better retract that strange linguistic policy. Malaysians should be speaking Bahasa the way we have always spoken it over the centuries and not speak Bahasa as if it is the Indonesian language!)

Many Malaysians in my age group -- the 40s -- are very displeased with Bahasa Baku.