I refer to Boon Hian's letter English use to higher standards unproven .

He hinted that I confused correlation with causation, by concluding English is the factor that puts the universities up the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) rankings list. He argued that should this be so, then all universities down the list should just switch to English and hey presto, they'd be climbing up the rankings in no time.

What I did say though was that the use of English has been one huge, important contributory factor. I mentioned there can be many others. I did delve in some detail why I had made this contention and I reiterate it now.

One very important feature of English is that it is a mature language, a conceptual language, and a very technical language. It is an intellectual language. It is a superior language when compared with other languages, especially when with Bahasa Malaysia (or Bahasa Kebangsaan, Bahasa Baku, or its current term Bahasa Melayu).

The store of knowledge in the English language - and the vocabulary that goes with it - is just too vast to make it any less so.

I also have hinted that the National University of Singapore has become a very useful control situation to gauge and compare Universiti Malaya's performance. The former sticks to English and, as the THES list has shown, has prospered.

UM had experimented with Bahasa Malaysia and is now saddled with disastrous results. The causation or cause and effect relationship is clear enough to me.