Letters

19th Apr (5)

I do love to write letters as they are one of the oldest means of communication that I learned when I was in my school days, plenty lots of essay in the format of letters. Nowadays we hardly use letter anymore as it is considered as old fashion. But since I myself always in the mood of old fashion ‘person’ I would like to have my love life to be recorded via a love letters corresponding. (Hu hu – a romanticism at heart, huh!) Well since I love almost everyone now, it seems that its better for me to share that lovely love feeling in this blog.

Talk about how am I so intrigued into letter writing, it reminds me of my long lost Sabahan friend who used to pen-friend with a boy from another town. We were staying in a hostel, so their corresponding should be meant a secret. She used another friend’s address, but the most interesting and special about those letters were that, before they were posted, other than the usual things of the talcum powder fragrance, she would crisply iron it to give her a good impression in the eyes of her boyfriend. And the treacherous friend would crinkle it before it got into the mail box. I wonder what the postman would say upon seeing this, and the boyfriend also. Too bad eh, but I do not approve the other girls doing even for the sake of joke..

Writing a letter used to be a known art of diplomacy to the Malays. It was a very serious business of expressing oneself via written words. And in doing so last time, in this region of the archipelago many centuries ago, the language were long-winded, chosen carefully and beautifully employed into sentences parallel with the Malays ‘budi-bahasa’ trait not to create any offence. It was definitely written in Jawi script, on a paper, skin or cloth, depending on the status of the person who corresponds. A great care was given to the elaboration and decoration of the frame of the letter’s content. The opening part should be always the praise to the Almighty, or sometimes certain titles/addresses were put as heading to impress the audience. The body or the content would again use the long-winded style language to tell what the matters all about.

Via the letters, we know that the Malays last time were very humble with their words and very sensitive in nature as well as very aesthetic in every facet of life. Not only that their words and their letter writing are aesthetic, yet the business of finding an envelope, sealing, and folding the letter were also given a special attention. That was letter writing in Malay Language, the English one, definitely much more straight forward language unless we would like to study classical English like in L’Mort d’Arthur…

How beautiful my heritage was, now writing a letter is almost non-existence, it has been changed with the development of the mass-multimedia technology, which I think could lead into the diminishing of good language use, i.e the sms language style, oh so bored..I prefer the old way…(hey, after all I am old am I?)