Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Kuchingku

"Kuchingku" is part of a greeting (see above). It is also a word sometimes used in poetry. It seems to be an announcement or greeting of some sort, because it often appears as the first word in writings at blogs. Here the word appear again in the first sentence of a blog text, in a discussion of a house cat whose name may be "Nyeng." If so, the word "nama" might mean "name" in Malay, which is the name of the primary language spoken in Malaysia. Actually, it's formally called "Bahasa Malay," and 50.4% of Malaysia is of the "Malay" ethnic group.

"On top of Malay and English, Kuchingites can usually speak his or her own ethnic dialect/language."

In terms of "salience," the word "Kuchingku" only appears 43 times at Google, which must mean either that it is not a common word in Malay, not much Malay text is available in Google, it is an odd variation of a common word, or it is a common word that is misspelled, which seems unlikely, since Kifly spells it this way and he has at least one graduate degree.