Thursday, November 08, 2007

Singular plural - Every

In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,

One of the most painful rules in English for Malay speakers (at least I found it hard) is the usage of 's' for verbs used with singular nouns.

We Malay speakers tend to swallow the 's' because the aforementioned rule is not practised in our language which for now will remain to be called Bahasa Malaysia even after attempts by certain groups to change it to Bahasa Melayu instead.

Even after attending hours and hours of grueling extra private classes, for so is the norm of the Malaysian students, parents tend to send them to such classes after school, hoping that it would improve their beloved children's academic performances, I still have difficulties deciding whether I should put an 's' on the verbs in my sentences.

Okay, the previous sentence is needlessly too long. A better sentence would be:

Even after attending hours and hours of grueling extra private classes, I still have difficulties deciding whether I should put an 's' on the verbs in my sentences.

For example, I would want to put an 's' for the verb that follows the pronoun 'every*' (everyone, everything, etc.) because, after all, 'every*' is translated into 'semua' in Malay and I consider that to be plural.

But poor alas, every form of 'every*' is actually considered singular in English and therefore verbs used with 'every*' are in the singular form, which more often than not, are verbs with an extra 's' at the end of it.

Summary:

Every is considered singular in English.

For example:

Everyone likes ice-cream.
Everything on the table is up for grabs.

Allah knows best.

xoxo

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

In my opinion that setiap would be a better translation for every.

abd said...

Kan? Setiap is a better translation indeed.

Disclaimer: I am neither an English native speaker nor a qualified English teacher.