My daughter had to bring sugar, asam boi powder and guava for her fruit preservation project at school. I prepared the items for her on Wednesday night, put them in a small shopping bag and she was all set. The next day she came home beaming, telling me that the project went well and they (the class pupils) could eat the preserved fruits on Friday. As Friday was a busy day for me, I forgot to remind her to take out the remains of her project items from the bag, and as expected she forgot to do it.
On Saturday, when I finally remembered, I asked her about it. When she admitted having forgotten to put the sugar back in the kitchen, I exclaimed "your bag will get anted", and surprisingly she didn't find the sentence funny. Later she asked me, "Mom, why did you say 'get anted'? Don't you know that 'ant' is a noun?". I laughed and told her the way I think must be becoming more and more Dusun. In Dusun you can almost use every root word as a noun or a verb, depending on how you phrase it. English does that too to a certain extent, like - this is a house, and this building can house 500 persons.
Oh well, I just finished rewriting the two teaching modules that UMS uses for Kadazandusun Levels 1 and 3. That must have affected me more than I realized that my English is starting to sound Dusun. Anyway, I like it that my daughter has this kind of language awareness...perhaps I can still hope that one day she would be able to speak Dusun fluently.
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