Tom Pepinsky

Category: Language

  • False Cognates: The Case of Village Patrols in Indonesia and Peru

    False cognates are words of two different languages with similar meaning that look like they share a common origin, but which actually do not. They are fun because they get us thinking about how languages develop and how they relate to one another, even when looks can be deceiving. Classic examples include arigato (Japanese) and obrigadu (Portuguese), both of which mean “thank you” but are entirely unrelated etymologically. Recently I stumbled across a pair of false cognates that are particularly interesting for political scientists: ronda kampung and ronda campesina, both of which refer to a local village security patrol.

    The Spanish term ronda campesina comes from Peru. It translates literally as “peasant rounds,” and describes a form of local security patrol. They are most well-known as “peasant self-defense forces” that resisted the Shining Path insurgency, although to the best of my understanding the concept of the ronda campesina predated the insurgency movement, and they originally developed organically before being legalized and armed by the Peruvian state under Fujimori.

    The word ronda shares an etymology with the English word round and means roughly the same thing, a “going around of” something. Campesino derives from the Spanish word campo, meaning field or countryside, so a campesino is literally someone who lives in the countryside. Campo derives from the Latin campus, the source of the word camp in English and champs in French.

    The Indonesian term ronda kampung, by contrast, translates as “village rounds.” These are not as well documented in English as are ronda campesina,[*] but descriptions can be found in the literature on village organization and local security in the post-independence period, frequently appearing near the term siskamling (or sistem keamanan lingkungan [= system of environmental safety], which also refers to local security provision). Sometimes ronda kampung is translated as “neighborhood watch.” The settlement that a campesino would inhabit could be described, in Indonesian or Malay, as a kampung, although the proper word for peasant (see, e.g., the authoritative Echols and Shadily) is petani [= farmer] and the word desa in Indonesian connotes something more decidedly rural than kampung, which can be an urban settlement too.

    The word ronda in Indonesian has no etymology that I can find. It is not listed as an Indonesian loanword on Wikipedia, but it almost certainly comes from Portuguese, as in Spanish above.

    The word kampung is more interesting. It is the source of the English word compound, as in encampment, via Malay.[**] Its etymology seems to trace back to Old Cham, the predecessor of the Cham language spoken today in mostly in Cambodia and a relative of Malay/Indonesian that also happens to be the first attested written example of any Austronesian language. Variations of kampung also appear in regional languages unrelated to Cham or Malay/Indonesian, namely Khmer and Thai (there is even a province in Cambodia called Kampong Cham).

    Here is where things get interesting. Observe that the meanings for Old Khmer kaṃveṅ are given as “enclosing wall, rampart.” And then observe that the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European source word from which the Latin campus derives is given as *kh2emp- (“to bend, curve”). Are these two more false cognates? I am aware of no historical linguistic work that documents borrowing between proto-IE and proto-Austronesian, in the way that we do have evidence of links between proto-IE and Old Sinitic. But it strikes me as entirely plausible that this parallel is not an accident.

    Maybe a historical linguist can help set me straight. To clarify exactly what I’m asking: is there any evidence that Latin campus and Old Cham kampong are derived from a common root shared (through borrowing) by proto-IE and proto-Austronesian? If not, is that link at all plausible?

    NOTES

    * A google search for ronda kampung returns mainly recordings of a moderately well-known Javanese gamelan song.
    ** Best Malay loanwords in English: amok, compound, cootie, gingham, ketchup, rattan.

  • Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia: What’s In a Name?

    Mahathir Mohamad roared back into Malaysian politics in 2016 as part of a movement against former Prime Minister Najib Razak. Together with other disgruntled former members of the United Malays National Organisation, Mahathir launched the Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia [= Malaysian United Indigenous Party], known in short form as Bersatu [= United].

    One issue that has always lingered in the back of my mind is why Bersatu employs the term pribumi rather than bumiputera. As part of a discussion with a graduate student studying the orang asli communities in peninsular Malaysia, this issue returned again.

    Both of these terms are used colloquially to refer to the “indigenous” ethnic groups of Indonesia and Malaysia. Bumiputera is a Malay word of Sanskrit etymology that means “sons of the soil.” Pribumi appears to be a direct translation of the Dutch word Inlander, which was contrasted to vreemde Oosterlingen [= foreign Easterners]. They both refer to the same thing: a citizen of Indonesia (pribumi) or Malaysia (bumiputera) who is not of Chinese or Indian extraction. Indigeneity here refers to the people of the Malay/Indonesian archipelago.*

    Now, for Malaysians, the word bumiputera has always been the politically relevant term. The New Economic Policy, for example, set targets for bumiputera equity ownership rather than Malay equity ownership. Because UMNO was the largest party in the country, and because the majority of bumiputeras are Malays, this policy effectively targeted Malays but did expand the policy coalition more broadly to include the politically important indigenous parties of East Malaysia.**

    That is why it is so curious in Bersatu uses the term pribumi rather than bumiputera. This choice has never been explained to me to my satisfaction. Pribumi clearly has meaning to Malay speakers, or the term would never have been chosen, but this does not explain the choice not to use the far more common and politically relevant term bumiputera. I would be very interested to know more about that choice and what it signifies.

    NOTES

    * There are some odd complications in Malaysia. Members of the Malaccan Portuguese community are for legal purposes understood to be bumiputeras, as are Thais living in the northern part of the peninsula.

    ** It also includes the orang asli of peninsular Malaysia, who are not particularly important politically, but who do represent an alternative understanding of the indigenous people of the Malay peninsula that can be unsettling for advocates of ketuanan Melayu [= Malay dominance].