Re: Rant: Defending Indonesian (was: Re: Newbie says hi)

On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 01:40:10AM -0500, Roger Mills wrote:
[snip]
> >>From: Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
> >>Funny that Indonesian seems to attract many conlangers. Maybe because it's
> >>the
> >>most successful conlang of all times ;))) .
[snip]
> And Teoh wrote (do I detect skepticism?):
Yes :-)

> > Indonesian is a conlang, eh?
[snip]
> I think one needs to rise to the defense of Indonesian.  It is no more a
> conlang or auxlang etc. etc. than modern English, French, Spanish, Russian,
> etc. etc.
Or Tagalog, or Mandarin, for that matter. The Philipino lady I was
referring to told me that Tagalog just took of all the diverse languages
in the region and became something of a linguia franca in that area. She
claims there were no "original" speakers of Tagalog. Just like what you
describe below:

> It was not "invented", it just developed-- Mat's "kind of
> invented" may be "kind of accurate", however.  In the legends surrounding
> the founding of Malacca (probably sometime late in the 1st millenium C.E),
> there is one that says "we took the best from all the languages of the
> settlers, and it became Malay"  But no Dokter Harapanto wrote a little
> booklet setting it forth.....

[snip]
> Greek or Italic? There is no answer.  At best, or worst, I'd prefer to think
> of Malay/Indonesian as a koiné.
Right.

[snip]
> Granted, that form of Malay was a courtly language, but an already
> standardized one.
Eeeek... nightmares of kings with unendingly long names, Tok Datuk Baginda
Yang Maha-Mulia, ... return to me. :-)

>  Peninsular Malay had, and may still have, at least as
> many distinct dialects as German. (They have been few studies,
> unfortunately.) And at that time the actual Malay speaking peoples of
> Indonesia were a definite minority.
Well, the Malay spoken in Malaysia now does have at least two distinct
varieties. One is the "official" language, which the government has tried
to keep "standard" by publishing an official dictionary, the Kamus Dewan,
defining the fine points of the officially-accepted version of the
language. (And obviously, people weren't speaking precisely this language,
which is why they had to issue the dictionary. It is instructive to note
that they tried to emphasize that final /a/ should be pronounced [a], and
at the time it had become trendy to say /@\/ instead, especially down at
the capital.)

The other is the so-called Bahasa Pasar (marketspeak), which has
practically become a pidgin of a less constricted form of Malay, local
Chinese dialects, a bit of Indian (not sure which of the Indian tongues,
unfortunately), and quite a bit of mangled English. There are actually
several variants of this, which developed respectively in the
Chinese/Indian/Malay-speaking people, each borrowing from the others'
lingos. English has become so trendy that the pronouns "I" and "you" are
increasingly substituted for local pronouns (though often heavily colored
by Chinese tones and Malay inflection, which makes it sound really bizarre
to an L1 English speaker).

[snip]
> One could I suppose have chosen to educate everybody in their native
> language--
> Acehnese, Batak, Minang, Sundanese, Javanese, Madurese, Balinese, Sasak,
> Buginese, Makassarese, 10 or so Toraja languages, the 100s of languages in
> the Moluccas, the 50 or so languages of Flores, the 10 or so of Timor---need
> I go on?  Sure, the Dutch practiced "divide and conquer" with skill, but
> even they couldn't see Balkanizing the situation further.
It is instructive to note that one of the goals of the Chinese writing
system, when it was invented/adopted, was to unify the diverse tribes and
peoples in ancient China, who were at the time basically autonomous
countries. The emperor at the time managed to unify all these little
states together, and one of the big factors was the common writing system.
It was a compromise between unity and letting the people continue speaking
their own lingos. You can still speak your mothertongue; but when you find
yourself in another part of the country with unintelligible speech, you
can write and be understood. Without this common factor (among other
factors of course), there would be a very lacking sense of being one
country, and you'd just end up with squabbling states and much internal
fighting.

Consider what the first Korean king did: he devised a distinct writing
system, different from Chinese, so that his people would have a sense of
difference with the Chinese, and have something they can identify as their
own. Some have said that if it weren't for this, he might have eventually
lost much of his kingdom to the Chinese, since his people would not have
felt differentiated from them.

[snip]
> The fact that the spread of a national language results in the eventual
> extinction of many regional languages is lamentable, especially to us
> linguists. But it is, I fear, inevitable. Again, what is the alternative?
[snip]

Is there one? The linguist in me would love to see and admire a multitude
of different languages; yet it is hardly a good thing for communication.
The fact that English is a de facto standard on the Internet is a major
factor for its ubiquity today. (Imagine English-speaking SMTP servers
talking to Malay-speaking SMTP servers: >HELO <SLMTPAGI >Protocol error!
>Koneksi terputus. So much for world-wide email.)

T

--
You've gotten under my skin. That you got there speaks ill of me. That you
like it there speaks ill of you. -- Speek, K5

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