Re: Saalangal stuff

On Fri, Dec 07, 2001 at 12:18:46AM -0500, Roger Mills wrote:
[snip]
> We were given similar advice when learning Indonesian-- which also avoids
> the 1st per. sing. pronoun like the plague.  All pronouns are omitted
> whenever possible. When speaking to or about "superiors", there are
> deferential forms, though I suspect younger speakers may be getting away
> from that.
Hmm, interesting. Colloquial Malay seems to love pronouns, but of course,
this is the "rough talk" among buddies or "lower class" people. The use of
"aku" and "kau" (short for "engkau"), which are considered rather rude
forms of the pronoun, are actually quite favored among buddies and groups
of young people.

The slightly more polite forms "saya" and "awak" are the common, everyday,
acceptable terms, which won't be regarded as rude if you use it with
elders, etc.. (Referring to, e.g., your teacher as "kau" or "engkau" is an
open invitation for punishment, though recently some more open-minded
teachers have come to take it as acceptable when they want to "socialize
with the kids".)

Now of course, there's also a third level of politeness which is "palace
talk" -- "baginda" for the 2nd person pronoun (or was that 3rd??), and I
forget what the other pronouns are :-P (Shows how much it's actually used
among the common people, hehe.) So far, I've only ever heard these terms
used in literature or in formal news broadcasts involving top levels of
government. People will look at you strange if they hear you saying such
words on the streets, etc..

As regards to avoiding pronouns... I'm not sure if that's a solely
Indonesian thing, or just the fact that pronouns tend to be dropped more
frequently than in English, when they are understood to be there.


T

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