Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Real Indonesian

    I watched a TV program the other day called Binar, which is a compression of the words Bahasa Indonesia Benar, meaning "True Indonesian Language."  It’s sponsored by the Ministry of Education here, and it is aimed at helping Indonesians to learn how to speak their language properly.  It seems to be aimed primarily at teenagers.  It features a very common device in Indonesian cultural propaganda: a well-dressed 50-something woman who speaks slowly, calmly, and knowledgeably as sort of a fountain of information and a symbol of Javanese propriety.  (This is the image that former President Megawati Sukarnoputri presents.)  I don’t know what the program normally deals with, but this time it was about the use of foreign words in common parlance–and how this is a bad thing. 

    Indonesian is a language which, like English, is well known for its propensity through history for borrowing words from other languages.  Sanskrit, Arabic (and thereby Turkish and Persian), Chinese (mostly Hokkien, some Cantonese), Portuguese, and Dutch have contributed hundreds (if not thousands) of words each to Indonesian.  Currently Indonesian is borrowing words from English, and the program was focused on trying to stop this practice by reminding people of the "proper" Indonesian words for things commonly referred to using English.  It was funny because these proper Indonesian replacements are very transparently recent borrowings from other European languages.

    Some examples, drawn from a mock dialog on planning a wedding:

    email should be pos el (pos was borrowed from the English "post," and el is a short form of "electric")
    calling should be  menelpon (the root of this word is telpon, from "telephone," and the prefix me- has been added as the Indonesian way of turning nouns into verbs)
    by faks should be  melalui faksimile (faksimile from French is distinguished from faks and faksimali from English)
    client should be  klien (the same word borrowed from Dutch a hundred years earlier)
    wedding organizer should be  pengelola pesta pernikahan (pesta was borrowed from the Portuguese fiesta, and means "party"; pernikahan is a abstract noun constructed from the Arabic root nikah, or "wedding")
    office should be  kantor (borrowed from Dutch)

    There were of course a couple of examples of English borrowing that have entirely Indonesian replacements (exhibition = pameran, visitor = tamu, print = cetak, invitation = undangan).  But it was very interesting that the characters on the show kept saying "OK" to signal agreement or understanding.  And they saying that people using English words were attempting to put on airs (gengsi, from the Arabic ghinsi).  In my view, Indonesian, like French or any other language, has no hope of resisting English linguistic imperialism.

  • Three Things, Mostly Unrelated Except for a Food Theme

    JMP Update: Everything is going swimmingly in Tangerang.  JMP is having a great time with her students, teaching pianists and violinists how to play the recorder and teaching her three flute students how to become better flutists.  She reports that her students are friendly and quite musically talented–much better than she even expected.  She is the envy of all other faculty at JISMF because she understands Indonesian and can identify unusual foods (e.g., "that’s not a potato, it’s a fish ball" or "this savory pancake is called martabak").

    Food Mistake: Every once in awhile I will order something I’ve never had before at a restaurant so that I can have something new to taste.  Usually it goes well, sometimes not at all.  Yesterday was a "not at all" moment.  I ordered something called sop kikil, which I guess you might translate as ox shank soup.  Ox shanks sound good, I figured it would be a fatty shank bone with some meat on it, sort of like oxtail soup.  What arrived at my table was a bowl full of very spicy and meaty, very delicious broth with fried potatoes and chopped tomatoes and herbs floating on top.  Yum.  When I put my spoon in it, though, I learned that I had the main ingredient was bite-sized pieces of knee joint cartilage, accompanied by some soft fat and marrow.  The fat and marrow were good, but the knee joint cartilage (which you were clearly supposed to eat) not so much.  Fortunately, with all that great broth and a plate of rice, I was happy.

    Found in Translation: I was at a Chinese restaurant the other day called The Grand Duck King.  It’s specialty was fresh fish (of course).  The restaurant was my very favorite kind of Chinese fish restaurant, with a a good fish tank full of living things.  I found some colorful translations of non-native creatures.

    Kepiting laba-laba ("spider crab") = King crab
    Kepiting telur ("Egg crab") = blue crab
    Kepiting banci ("Shemale crab") = I’m not sure what this is, looked like a plain old crab to me
    Kerang gajah ("Elephant clam") = geoduck
    Kerang bambu ("Bamboo clam") = razor clam (this makes sense when you look at one)
    Ikan malas ("Lazy fish") = freshwater bass