Indo. tidak/bukan (was: A question and introduction)

H.S.Teoh wrote:


>On Sat, Jun 15, 2002 at 10:39:27PM -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
>[snip]
>> This is somewhat similar to Indonesian, with two negatives _tidak_ for
>> verbs, adj., sentences; and _bukan_ for nouns and pronouns, most often in
>> statements like "X is not (a) Y"--
>
>According to what I perceive of Malay, the cousin of Indonesian, _tidak_
>is best understood as "did not", and _bukan_ as "not".
>
>> 1a. saya tidak melihat gadis itu "I didn't see that girl"
>> 1b.saya tidak melihat gadis-gadis "I didn't see (any) girls"
>
>If you use _bukan_, you get a different shade of meaning:
>        saya bukan melihat gadis itu
>        "I wasn't looking at that girl." ("It's not her I was looking at").
To this forgetful, decidedly non-native speaker, that doesn't sound like
proper _Indonesian_-- we were always told that you cannot negate a verb with
Bukan.
>
Snip
>> Even more difficult is the use in writing of both "tidaklah..."and
>> "bukanlah..." which are fronted, and produce sort-of cleft sentences, "It
>> isn't that...., It is not the case that...".  It's one bit of Indonesian
>> grammar that did not find its way into Kash.......
>
>Hmm, that seems to be peculiarly Indonesian. Malay also has these
>constructs, but they are rare.
I've mainly encountered it in "scholarly" (hence western/Dutch? influenced)
works by early/mid-20th C. writers. It could usually be figured  out by
context, but that didn't imprint any sort of rule.......
---------------------------------------------------------------------
And then I wrote:
>>It gets more complicated, and is very difficult for a westerner to
>>remember the proper usage.
And Jeff Jones replied:
>Really? So far no more difficult than German.
Not quite.  For ex., German would use kein in--
"There is no doctor in our village"
"No doctor is on duty"

But _tidak_ in Indonesian, and sometimes paraphrased:
Tidak ada dokter di desa kita  not there-is dr. in village our
Tidak ada dokter (yang) {on duty}  not there-is dr. (who (is)) {on duty}

whereas
Bukan dokter (yang) {on duty} 'It's/There's not a _dr._ on duty" (implied:
but someone else is, maybe just a nurse)

English and German no/kein, I suspect, can refer to either situation.

>>It's one bit of Indonesian
>>grammar that did not find its way into Kash.......
>Well you didn't intend Kash to be an alien relex of formal Indonesian, did
>you?
Heaven forbid! :-)

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