Re: Indonesia, third gender, etc.

Anna Johnson wrote:


>Teoh wrote: "Same in Indonesian, at least according to the book.  I had
>little opportunity to get that familiar with anyone."
Not Teoh; that was me, Roger Mills
>
>I found that having spoken North Sumatran Bhasa Indonesia, I spoke
>unintelligible Bahasa Melayu; for example, in North Sumatra, people
>typically use the second-person referent 'nggak' (where the final k is
>reduced to a strong glottal stop and the initial is a nasal-voiced
consonant
>cluster of the g variety) - hence when I spoke to my Singaporean college
>roommate's Kuala Lumpuran cousins, who spoke only Malay-Chinese and Bahasa
>Melayu
The textbook I learned from (John Wolff's) (with a native speaker
consultant) tried to include colloquialisms like "nggak", as if they were
widely understood.  Not in Jakarta or points east.  The Achehense and Batak
university students I knew spoke very standard Indonesian, though they're
probably not representative of their local variety

 Even my attempts to ask for water - "Apaka disini ada akua?" was
>simply useless.
?Akua????? Not "air", or maybe spelled "ayer"?

I was living amongst matrilineal and
>female-dominated animist cattle herders,
Who?  Sounds like the Minang Kabau, but they're more in the south IIRC>

 Acehnese fundamentalist Muslims who
>used Arabicisms with sharp Arabic accents (like glottals etc.), and
>Christian recent ex-cannibal fishermen,
Bataks?  Neat people.

>Can anyone familiar with Malaysia tell me if there is a three-gender system
>in the rest of Indonesia and Malaysia as there is in North Sumatra where I
>was, i.e. wanita / pria / waria 'female / male / [no English equivalent]'?
"Waria" looks like a blend of the two.  It's not in Echols' dictionary,
though a really good one like Poerwadarminta might have it.  It would appear
to correspond nicely to your "scrat", "scrette".......a phenomenon not
unknown in Indonesia.

I'd like to hear more about your experiences over there.  But under the
present circumstances, off-list is probably in order! Roger