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

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Monday, June 17, 2002, 3:52
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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H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>