KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 1 — The Education Ministry (MOE) only has jurisdiction over books published by the ministry itself, Senior Education Minister Datuk Radzi Jidin clarified today.
He was commenting on a screenshot of a page of a Form Five History reference book that carried a wrongful depiction of Tun V.T. Sambanthan’s face, which went viral recently.
“Firstly I would like to explain that our checks revealed the book in question was published by a private company and not by the MOE.
“Our jurisdiction at the ministry is meant for books published by the MOE. The main focus of the ministry is to do our best to ensure the books contain data and facts that have been verified,” Radzi told the media after launching the Kamus Dewan Perdana here today.
The wrongful depiction of Tun V.T. Sambanthan in the reference book is said to have even raised the concern of his daughter, Deva Kunjari Sambanthan.
On the Kamus Dewan Perdana, Radzi said the newest edition of the dictionary contained over 120,000 root words and showcased the development of Malay vocabulary in a period of over a century.
“InsyaAllah we will see the dictionary becoming the main reference for all the Malay language. There have been certain improvements done to the dictionary, including introducing Jawi words that will benefit the future generations greatly,” he added.
Radzi said the Malay language was rapidly developing in the current digitalisation era and expected that many new words would be introduced in the future.
“It is important that the dictionary is digitalised to serve as a good reference not only for those in Malaysia but also the entire world,” he added.
Kamus Dewan Perdana is the newest dictionary produced by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) and is the first Malay language dictionary in the world to use data sources from the corpus database developed by DBP as well as Internet data.
— Bernama
