Kapitein

Aku..seorang kapiten..

When he arrived in a English-speaking country for the first time, a friend of mine told me, he had a confusing experience when he heard the confusing English word spoken by native speaker there. Another friend of mine told me a story where she heard an Englishman speaking words after words of English while she can't comprehend most of what the Englishman said. She was with another Englishman who listened with her to the first Englishman. She said to the second one, "I can't hear any word from him". Her friend replied with, "Don't worry.. I can't understand what he is saying either! What I'm doing is guessing what he meant."

Here is my own experience of such confusing spelling in Bahasa Indonesia.

When I was a kid, when I was in kindergarten, there's one song that I remembered I sing incorrectly. The funny thing is..I realized that I sing it incorrectly after I entered 2nd grade in Junior School. As long as I remember, there is no one who tried to correct what I sing.. except my Mom. But even my Mom had tried to correct the spelling, I insisted to sing it in the wrong way.

Still remember the next phrase of the song?

Mempunyai pedang panjang..

Instead of saying those words for the second phrase, I sang it this way..

Mampu naik pedang panjang..

How silly I was!

Amazingly, the words are rhymes to each other though.. \mem-pu-nyai\ rhymes with \mam-pu naik\. So I think it wasn't my fault to sing it incorrectly, right or right?

Of course today I sing it in the right way as the song writer intended. The silly things came from the hearings of a child, who misheard the lyrics and sang it happily..

Kalau berjalan, prok-prok-prok!
Aku seorang kapiten!