Bahasa indonesia

i don't understand the posts about malay pidgin and how bahasa
isn't fit to express "complicated" things.

simple syntax doesn't mean stupid or childish thoughts.
it just means an easier lang to learn and to use.
bahasa is as much a pidgin or a creole as english was once.

simple vocabulary doesn't mean poor vocabulary.
it means satisfactorily regular constructs and derivations with no flexion
frills for gender, plural, tense, etc.
in other words, you know how to derive or build most words, a bit as if
-ure was consistetly used to make nouns of result, -tion to make
nouns of action, etc. which is rarely the case in english.

"complicated" things either means :

1. rare concepts :
i only know about legal stuff and bahasa has enough vocab to deal with
any legal stuff. dutch or english words aren't so many. arabic or pali
words are as valid word tanks as latin.
but of course not all langs systematically create words like french
"logiciel" or "progiciel" to match english words like "software".

2. making long and intricated sentences  :
this is best achieved when someone doesn't know himself exactly what
he wants to say. to cope with a long sentence, just make short sentences
that make sense and put them one after the other in a logical order such as
the chronological order. it's amazing how complicated things get simpler
and quicker this way.

i think that easy syntax is felt impractical by many because they
don't know how to use it.
"we gather, use ax, cut tree, it falls" isn't less accurate than
"we cut down a tree together with an ax"
but it's difficult for many westerners to adapt to the first.
(bahasa is usually of the second anyway)

bahasa syntax can also be used in a more formal and "difficult" way
to take different shades. for instance there are various passive forms and
the word order can be made OSV sometime. but i don't think that more
difficult means more accurate.

mathias