Wak Long & Pak Dogol in Paris

(Shadow play, pic courtesy of All Malaysia). We acquire and keep words, names and meanings as we go through life. The term "wayang kulit", made up of usually unconnected words may not mean much to those who have not seen Wak Long and Pak Dogol in action. It's amazing, names like Wak Long and Pak Dogol can be retained and recalled with ease. Although we are used to names such as Ali, Abu and Ahmad, we can also retain a long list of alien words such as chateaubriand steak, chicken cordon bleu casserole, haathi mere saathi, kuch kuch hota hai, Al Pacino, Luciano Pavrotti, Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Darth Vader, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Schumacher, Bayern Munich, Ronaldinho, Maria Sharapova, Mary Poppins and supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. So we sent Wak Long and Pak Dogol to Paris by kapa trebe to give the French a different flavour of les guignols and puppet shows, and to see if they can remember the names of the 2 clowning court jesters.

Kapa trebe blepah

At a quick glance, one can be forgiven for thinking that this might be a signage in foreign language from an airport perhaps somewhere in Africa. Look again carefully. I am amused by this Kelantan airport signage from an interesting story in The Star newspaper today (which also shows a nice picture of actress Maya Karin in tudung, yes, that's right, on a Celcom billboard - only in Kelantan. She appears differently, as one would normally observe, on similar billboards elsewhere).

And a rough guide to semantics: Check-in = Perekso dale; departures = kapa trebe belepah; information = nok tanyo gapo?; viewing gallery = slamak jale. The words are perfectly clear and understood by Kelantanese but the phonetics can be quite a challenge to those without a valid paspok to Klate.