Although ... but

The following revision is taken from the dissertation of a Malay-speaking student of Political Science (points not here at issue already corrected in the original)::

Original Revisions
Although the Malay-Muslim intellectuals see things from different perspectives, and give various interpretations of the government's Islamic programme, but most of them agree that Islamic values alone without the Islamic system as a whole are not enough. 1. Although the Malay-Muslim intellectuals see things from different perspectives, and give various interpretations of the government's Islamic programme, most of them agree that Islamic values alone without the Islamic system as a whole are not enough.
2. The Malay-Muslim intellectuals see things from different perspectives, and give various interpretations of the government's Islamic programme, but most of them agree that Islamic values alone without the Islamic system as a whole are not enough.

The important point to notice here is that the original sentence, which looks so strange to English eyes, shows the normal grammatical pattern for a number of languages of the Far East including Bahasa Malaysia and Chinese, which require two connectives 'although' and 'but' rather than one or the other alone as in English. Other languages of the region such as Thai allow, but do not require, doubled connectives:

Language although but Comments
Bahasa Malaysia walaupun tetapi Connectives must be used in combination
Chinese (Mandarin) suiran keshe Connectives must be used in combination
Thai meiwa tae Connectives may be used singly, or in combination

The following further examples, like the one discussed above, are taken from two pages of the student's draft:

  1. Even though most of them do not have a complete alternative to the present government, but their criticism of the present system is sufficient to to produce a reaction in the government on Islamic issues.
  2. Although PAS is very critical of the the government's programme, but it has not proposed one workable solution to the present problems.

For this student, the tendency to 'double' connectives was clearly powerful, and I suggested he should as soon as possible use the 'Find' function on his work-processor to identify all the 'buts' in his text, and to make sure that they were not paired with '(al)thoughs'.

5th June 1998

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 Consultant: Tim Johns