Grammar & Me

Malay doesn't have any tense. It has sudat, already, and belum, not yet, but there is no such thing as eat, eaten, ate in Bahasa Melayu. "Great," I hear you thinking.

So the other day, I'm sitting in one of my school's canteens drinking coffee with a librarian, when a cat saunters up. (Even scrappy cats like this one saunter - it's a DNA thing.) He pauses at my laptop bag, looks at me, looks back and starts pawing at it, miaowing strenuously. I look at him and laugh; say to the librarian, "He can smell my cat!"

She looks at me expectantly, so I go on, "My cat loves to sleep in the bag, I don't know why. She sleeps in the bag all the time. He can smell my cat."

She looks at me oddly, so I stop, and then she turns to another teacher and speaks in Dusun, and the other teacher says to me, "Miss Emily, why don't you leave your cat at home?"

There's a small pause, during which I realise that really, if one is not to encounter a situation in which a colleague believes that your cat is currently sleeping inside your laptop bag, one needs tense.

I did eventually get across that I was talking of habit rather than current reality, but the librarian's been eyeing me suspiciously ever since...