Malay 101

It was Greek to me. ~William Shakespeare

Malay word order is subject-verb-object like English. There are no plurals, grammatical gender, or verb conjugation for person, number or tense, all of which are expressed with adverbs or tense indicators: saya makan, "I eat" (now), saya makan sudah, "I eat already" = "I ate".

A characteristic of Malay is that it is a so-called agglutinative language, which means that the suffixes are all attached to a base root. So a word can become very long. For example there is a base word hasil which means "result". But it can be extended as far as ketidakberhasilannya, which means his/her failure.

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