Tom Pepinsky

Category: Language

  • The Indonesian Linguistic Diversity Challenge

    This weekend some colleagues and I are hosting a delegation visiting from Badan Pusat Statistik (BPS), the Indonesian central statistical agency. We are hoping to find a way for Cornell to warehouse some of the vast wealth of statistical data that BPS has been collecting for the past fifty years. As part of BPS’s presentation, we learned about something called the Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Statistik, which you’d translate as something like the Institute for Statistical Sciences.

    The Institute for Statistical Sciences

    Looking at the name of the institute, I was struck by something interesting: each word has a different etymology. Check it out:

    • Sekolah was borrowed into Indonesian from the Portuguese escola, for “school”
    • Tinggi is from Malay, and means “high”
    • Ilmu was borrowed from the Arabic ‘ilm (عِلْمٌ), or “knowledge”
    • Statistik was borrowed from the Dutch Statistiek, which of course means “statistics”

    Four words, four different origins. It got me thinking: how many different word origins could you fit into one natural Indonesian phrase or sentence?

    Which leads me to the Indonesian Linguistic Diversity Challenge. The goal is to produce a phrase or sentence that contains the most number of word origins in the most compact way possible. I can take Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Statistik and lengthen it by one: Perpustakaan Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Statistik, or “the library at the Institute of Statistical Sciences,” by adding Perpustakaan, formed from the Sanskrit root pustaka, or “book.” But that’s kinda cheating.

    The most compact example I can think of by myself is lumpia pisang coklat keju:

    • lumpia borrowed from the Hokkien lun pia (潤餅), and refers to a spring roll
    • pisang is just the Malay word for “banana”
    • coklat is “chocolate,” from Dutch
    • keju is from Portuguese queijo, or “cheese”

    Food is a particularly good area for inspiration (many words from Hokkien), as are household items (Dutch and Portuguese); science, culture, and literature (Arabic and Sanskrit); and technology (English).

    The ultimate winner of the challenge would be a phrase or sentence that combines the nine most common sources of Indonesian vocabulary—Arabic, Dutch, English, Hokkien, Javanese, Malay, Portuguese, Persian, and Sanskrit—in just nine words. Frankly, that seems almost impossible, given that English, Javanese, and Persian are actually pretty rare.

    Much more likely but no less impressive would be one that included the “Big Six”—Arabic, Dutch, Hokkien, Malay, Portuguese, and Sanskrit—in six words. I leave it to you, readers. The winner gets 1 internet.

  • Etymology of Coconut Oil Stew

    Every Indonesia hand knows about rendang, a spicy mutton or beef curry. What makes rendang so special is that it is prepared by boiling meat in coconut milk until the water of the coconut milk evaporates. When that happens, the coconut oil separates from the solids, and is used for frying the meat. Long-time readers will remember when we first made this dish in Jakarta in 2004.

    Rendang Daging, Taman Rasuna Apartments Flavor, 2004

    But maybe it’s not so special. It turns out that every good Jamaican knows about run dung (occasionally rundung or run-dung), also known as Dip and Fall Back, because

    When yuh boil down di coconut milk with seasoning to di point it turn custard and yuh add the salt fish – shad, cod or mackerel yuh haffi dip and fall back.

    This description seems to be exactly the same as making rendang. And run dung isn’t always made with fish. Check out this image of chicken run dung:

    Chicken in coconut “run dung” sauce, from http://www.bestjamaica.com

    The question to ask is how it got that way. Does rendang ≈ run dung? A brief web search cannot uncover an etymology for either term, but this is too close to be an accident.

    If the terms are related, it’s fun to speculate about the possible etymological links. Three paths seem possible to me.

    1. British encountered rendang either in Malaya or in the Netherlands Indies, and brought the recipe and the name with them to Jamaica. This isn’t as unlikely as it might seem: Sir Stamford Raffles was born in Jamaica, after all, and we all eat something called ketchup (= kecap).
    2. A related version of this: rendang came to the West Indies via the Javanese in Suriname—although rendang is Minangkabau in origins, I’m sure Javanese had heard of it—and from there made its way to the islands.
    3. Both run dung and rendang come from some Indo-Aryan or Dravidian root. It moved to Indonesia like many other words of those origins, through trade and cultural contact, and it moved to the West Indies through colonial migration. This is a story of common origins rather than later contact.

    If I were a PhD student in anthropology, I would work on topics like this.