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

On Sun, Jun 16, 2002 at 11:13:29PM -0400, Roger Mills wrote:
> H.S.Teoh wrote:
[snip]
> >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]

Hmm. That could be a Malay colloquialism then. Nevertheless, I've always
thought of _bukan_ as "not so" and _tidak_ as "did not". The above example
I gave actually more likely implies "I wasn't looking at her, I was doing
something else"; whereas _tidak_ would mean, "I was looking, but didn't
see her".


T

--
Try to keep an open mind, but not so open your brain falls out. -- theboz

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