Editing Anthony Burgess (section)

== Linguistics ==
"Burgess's linguistic training", wrote Raymond Chapman and Tom McArthur in ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'': "...{{nbsp}}is shown in dialogue enriched by distinctive pronunciations and the niceties of register".<ref>{{cite book |date=1992 |editor-first=Tom |editor-last=McArthur |title=The Oxford companion to the English language |url=https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0002unse_1991 |url-access=registration |publisher=Oxford University Press |page=[https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont0002unse_1991/page/167 167] |isbn=978-0-19-214183-5 |lccn=92224249 |oclc=1150933959}}</ref> During his years in Malaya, and after he had mastered [[Jawi script|Jawi]], the Arabic script adapted for Malay, Burgess taught himself the [[Persian language]], after which he produced a translation of Eliot's ''[[The Waste Land]]'' into Persian (unpublished). He worked on an anthology of the best of English literature translated into Malay, which failed to achieve publication. Burgess's published translations include two versions of ''[[Cyrano de Bergerac (play)|Cyrano de Bergerac]]'',<ref>{{cite book |last1=Rostand |first1=Edmond |author1-link=Edmond Rostand |author2=Anthony Burgess |title=Cyrano de Bergerac, translated and adapted by Anthony Burgess |publisher=Nick Hern Books |year=1991 |edition=New |isbn=978-1-85459-117-3}}</ref> ''[[Oedipus the King]]''<ref>{{Cite book |isbn=978-0-8166-0667-2 |title=Oedipus the King |author=Sophocles |translator=Anthony Burgess |publisher=University of Minnesota Press |year=1972 }}</ref> and ''[[Carmen]]''.

Burgess's interest in language was reflected in the invented, [[Anglo-Russian]] teen slang of ''A Clockwork Orange'' ([[Nadsat]]), and in the movie ''[[Quest for Fire (film)|Quest for Fire]]'' (1981), for which he [[Constructed language|invented]] a prehistoric language (''Ulam'') for the characters. His interest is reflected in his characters. In ''[[The Doctor is Sick]]'', Dr Edwin Spindrift is a lecturer in linguistics who escapes from a hospital ward which is peopled, as the critic Saul Maloff put it in a review, with "brain cases who happily exemplify varieties of English speech". Burgess, who had lectured on phonetics at the [[University of Birmingham]] in the late 1940s, investigates the field of linguistics in ''[[Language Made Plain]]'' and ''[[A Mouthful of Air (book)|A Mouthful of Air]]''.

The depth of Burgess's multilingual proficiency came under discussion in [[Roger Lewis (biographer)|Roger Lewis]]'s [[Anthony Burgess: A Life|2002 biography]]. Lewis claimed that during production in Malaysia of the BBC documentary ''A Kind of Failure'' (1982), Burgess's supposedly fluent [[Malay language|Malay]] was not understood by waitresses at a restaurant where they were filming. It was claimed that the documentary's director deliberately kept these moments intact in the film to expose Burgess's linguistic pretensions. A letter from David Wallace that appeared in the magazine of the London ''[[Independent on Sunday]]'' newspaper on 25&nbsp;November 2002 shed light on the affair. Wallace's letter read, in part:
{{blockquote|
...&nbsp;the tale was inaccurate. It tells of Burgess, the great linguist, "bellowing Malay at a succession of Malayan waitresses" but "unable to make himself understood". The source of this tale was a 20-year-old BBC documentary&nbsp;... [The suggestion was] that the director left the scene in, in order to poke fun at the great author. Not so, and I can be sure, as I was that director&nbsp;... The story as seen on television made it clear that Burgess knew that these waitresses were not Malay. It was a Chinese restaurant and Burgess's point was that the ethnic Chinese had little time for the government-enforced national language, [[Bahasa Malaysia]] [Malay]. Burgess may well have had an accent, but he did speak the language; it was the girls in question who did not.
}}

Lewis may not have been fully aware of the fact that a quarter of Malaysia's population is made up of [[Hokkien]]- and [[Yue Chinese|Cantonese]]-speaking [[Malaysian Chinese|Chinese]]. However, Malay had been installed as the National Language with the passing of the [[Language Act]] of 1967. By 1982 all [[Education in Malaysia|national primary and secondary schools in Malaysia]] would have been teaching with [[Bahasa Melayu]] as a base language (see [[Harold Crouch]], ''Government and Society in Malaysia'', Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996).