So... Was That Obama Sign Something We Should Be Ashamed Of?
The power of punctuation!
By Nandini Balakrishnan — 25 Nov 2015, 07:41 PM
The English language has been recognised as the global language for decades now and is very commonly used in almost all parts of the world.
As for Malaysia, English is a pretty common language here and most Malaysians understand the language, even if they can't speak it fluently.
So, talking about English in Malaysia, we are all aware of the fiery debate that erupted last weekend over the signage welcoming American President Barack Obama, that surfaced last Friday, 20 November
This signage which reads, "Welcome To The President Of USA Barack Obama", was put up by Dewan Bandaraya Kuala Lumpur (DBKL) on Friday, according to English daily, New Straits Time.
After the photo surfaced, it went viral and Malaysians all over were commenting and debating about the poor quality of English language in Malaysia and chiding the city hall workers for not being more attentive to such grammatical details.
Here are some of the comments that surfaced on Facebook talking about how embarrassing it is for Malaysians to have a "grammatically incorrect" signage welcoming the president of an English-speaking country
While the majority of Malaysians are all up in arms about the "grammatically incorrect" signage, some seem to think that the there are no errors in the welcome message
Oh My English took the initiative to check with British Council about the welcome message
Image via Oh My English/Facebook
However, another sign the was put up the day after that read, 'Welcome To Malaysia Mr Barack Obama President Of USA'
Okay, we think that the sentence is grammatically correct, but it probably needs a comma after the word 'welcome', to help it flow better.
So, it should have been 'Welcome, to the President of USA Barack Obama' instead of 'Welcome to the President of USA Barack Obama'.
Nevertheless, since none of us are English majors, we decided to check with an English teacher and figured that she might have a more constructive insight on the issue.
Here's what she said:
"We don't normally write it that way (referring to the original signage), it sounds like a translation. There are different ways of conveying the message and there's no hard and fast rule (on writing the message).
"Not a big deal, there are more atrocious mistakes and the message was (already) made," she said.
Delving further into the issue, she provided some suggestions on how the message could have been written instead
She said that the message could have read as;
"Welcome
President Barack Obama of USA"
"A big welcome to the president of the USA"
Hence, we agree that Malaysians can learn to perfect and polish their English, but there's really no need to judge the whole country's English language abilities based on a single grammar blunder
A lot of netizens were also talking about how the message was on an LED board and they might not necessarily be able to add a comma in it.
While we are on the topic of the English language and its usages in Malaysia, read about this young teacher's experience with working in a rural school in Malaysia and why he thinks his 16-year-old students have the English language proficiency of 4-year-olds: