A Comparative Study Of Affixes In Chinese And Bahasa Malaysia

Each language has unique characteristics in terms of syntax, vocabulary and affixes. As regards Chinese affixes, Mr. Lv Shuxiang has pointed out that semantics of modern Chinese affixes aren’t completely grammaticalized, which may affix to roots, words and even phrases. In this paper, Chinese affixes are considered to have other features. For instance, foreign affixes will be rapidly localized and achieve fast development once they are absorbed by Chinese. Although there are prefixes and infixes in Chinese, Chinese suffixes are the most productive among Chinese affixes. As an extremely critical part of Bahasa Malaysia, Malaysian affixes have multiple grammatical and semantic characteristics. Besides, they are widely used and a set of change laws have been established for their phonetic changes.Although Chinese and Bahasa Malaysia have different features, they have something in common concerning grammatical meanings of their affixes. In view of this, Chinese and Bahasa Malaysia are comparatively examined from the perspective of meanings of affixes and grammatical forms based on their affixes. Then, features, similarities and differences of these two languages are summed up, in hope that negative transfer may be reduced for Chinese students who learn Bahasa Malaysia and Malaysian students who learn Chinese, for the purpose that learners can learn and master the languages more rapidly and effectively to get twice the result with half the effort in the course of learning a language.