80 in capitals. However, the word did not consist of the initial letters of some
existing words. PY was derived from the Javanese word payu and the speakers of Bahasa Binan appeared to use the letters “p” and “y” to replace the word payu in
Javanese. The second reason for the writer to include PY as one of the alphabetic
abbreviations in Bahasa Binan was because the word was the short form of the word PY. The writer believed that there were no words written in capitals unless
the words were alphabetic abbreviations or acronyms. Since the word PY did not fulfill the criterion to be pronounced as a single word, the word then was not an
acronym.
d. Clipping in Cockney and Bahasa Binan
The writer found that there were many Cockney words that were in the form of phrases. This phenomenon is in par with the statement of Wherrett 2010
who says that most of the words in Cockney are in binary expressions. This appeared in the word “plates of meat,” which was often pronounced as “plates” to
mean “feet.” The writer saw this process as the clipping process because the speakers of Cockney excluded or shortened some parts of the phrases that were
treated as words in Cockney. Other than the word “plates of meat,” other examples of clipping in Cockney are described in Table 4.8.
Table 4.8: Clipping in Cockney
Word Original Word
Meaning
airs airs and graces
faces ball
ball of chalk walk
butcher’s butcher’s hook
look
81 The words “airs,” “ball,” and “butcher’s” were the clippings from the word
“airs and graces,” “ball of chalk,” and “butcher’s hook.” Grobelnik 2008 says that Cockney always deals with the binary expressions that are treated as single
words. This meant that the word “airs and graces,” “ball of chalk,” and “butcher’s hook” were treated as independent words in Cockney. The words then underwent
the process of clippings to ease the speakers’ communication. Most of the time the speakers of Cockney employed clipping to the last words in the binary
expressions so that the speaker solely used the first words from the binary expression in order to convey the intended meaning.
In fact, the speakers of Cockney clipped the last words of the binary expressions for the sake of distracting the lay people to understand the conveyed
words. The reason to clip the last words was mostly because the last words rhymed with the intended words in English as this appeared in the word “and
graces,” which rhymed with the word “faces.” The same case also happened to the words “balls of chalk” and “butcher’s hook,” which were clipped into “balls” and
“butcher’s” because the words “of chalk” and “hook” rhymed with the intended English words “walk” and “look.” The writer saw the phenomenon of employing
the clipping to all the words in Cockney as a reasonable process because the primary nature of Cockney was a secret language.
The case of clipping in Bahasa Binan was not as massive as it was in Cockney. The writer found that the speakers of Bahasa Binan also often clipped
the binary expressions. However, the case of binary expression clipping in Bahasa Binan was harder to predict since the speakers of Bahasa Binan never had the
82 strict rules to clip the words. The case of binary expression clippings in Bahasa
Binan is depicted in Table 4.9.
Table 4.9: Clipping in Bahasa Binan
Word Original Word
Meaning
aida aida mustafa
AIDS bellina
meriam bellina defecate
cintami cintami atmanegara
chinese malida
malida sudrajat shy
sundari sundari sukoco
bitchprostitute
The words aida, cintami, malida, and sundari in fact shared the same characteristics of clippings that happened in Cockney. It appeared that in the
words aida, cintami, maida, and sundari, the speakers of Bahasa Binan clipped the second words of the binary expressions and persistently used the first words to
refer to the whole expressions and meaning. This meant that the words aida coped the whole expression of Aida Mustafa as well as the entire meaning “AIDS” or
“Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome.” The same case also happened to the word Cintami, Malida, and Sundari
that coped the entire meanings and words Cintami Atmanegara, Malida Sudrajat, and Sundari Sukoco. However, the writer saw the word Bellina had undergone the
anomaly process of clipping in Bahasa Binan because the speakers did not use the first word to cope the entire binary expression Meriam Bellina. The speakers
instead used the second word of the phrase Meriam Bellina to mean “to defecate.” The writer found that many cases of clippings in Cockney and Bahasa
Binan were derived from the binary expressions that shared the same rhyme with
83 the intended meanings. In other words, it could be said that either the words “airs”
or “graces” in “airs and graces” must have rhymed with the intended meaning from the actual word in the source language. The same case actually happened in
Bahasa Binan. The speakers of Bahasa Binan always found the expressions that had the same rhyme with the intended word in the source language. Therefore, the
clipping of the word Meriam Bellina, which was clipped into Bellina, was done simply because the word Bellina rhymed with the word berak or “to defecate.”
The difference of clipping in Cockney and Bahasa Binan laid on the words to clip. In Cockney, most of the words to clip in the binary expressions
were the second words whose ending sounds rhymed with the intended meanings in the source languages. In other words, it could be said that the speakers of
Cockney never used the words that rhymed with the intended words to say. This fact was seen in the word “Britney Spears.” Instead of saying “Spears” that
rhymed with the intended word “ears,” the speakers would preferably use “Britney” in order to avoid other people to understand the speech.
However, the case of words to clip in Cockney was not applied in Bahasa Binan. In fact, the speakers of Bahasa Binan often clipped the words that did not
rhyme with the intended word. This case could be seen by looking at the word Cintami Atmanegara. The speakers of Bahasa Binan turned out to exclude the
second word Atmanegara from the binary expression Cintami Atmanegara because the word Atmanegara did not rhyme with the word Cina, which was the
intended word to say in Bahasa Indonesia.
84
e. Blend in Cockney and Bahasa Binan
