Language: Menggatal

Have a go at me for insulting somebody else’s language, but this just cracks me up.

The area where our power plant is being built is an industrial area with power plants and factories called “Menggatal”.

For those of you who think it’s just another name, it’s not. For those who think that it probably sounds perfectly fine in the local lingo (Kadazan and what have yous), it probably does… but consider the following dissection of the Malay grammar:

Verb/Adjective is put into it’s context of time and intent, with an verb-modifiers stuck to the front and back of the word - affixes. For example:

Use ~ Guna	Beautiful ~ Cantik
Uses/Using ~ Mengguna/menggunakan	Beautify ~ Mempercantikkan
Used (past tense) ~ Digunakan	Most beautifullest ~ Tercantik sekali

Hence, “men-/meng-/memper-” puts a verb into the context that it is being done… or implying “to be” and in the process of doing/being.

Gatal on the other hand, is the Malay word for “itchy”, and sometimes in slang, also meaning “horny”… go figure why it is. ;)

So technically, Menggatal means:

“In the process of being horny”

I think I might have just signed up to build a power plant in a redlight district, and gosh I love taking apart languages!