Anton, Bahasa Indonesia's vanguard

Tantri Yuliandini, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

How does it feel to talk with a linguistic expert? Well, it is like dancing with a professional and you have two left feet. I was conscious of being ever watchful of how I posed my sentences.

Not that Anton Moedardo Moeliono ever minded the bungles I made in my questions, but next to his flawless Bahasa Indonesia, I felt like a baby learning to talk.

Who could blame me, right? After all, this is the man who had crisscrossed the globe for his education -- the University of Indonesia (1958), Cornell University (1965), Leiden University (1971-72), the University of Hawaii (1977), the Australian National University (1980-81) and back full circle to the University of Indonesia (1981).

He has received honors from at least four countries -- Indonesia's Satyalencana Karya Setia in 1983, the Vatican's Knight of St. Gregory the Great in 1993, the Doctor of Letters Honoris Causa from Melbourne University in 1995, and Officer of the Order of Oranje-Nassau from the Dutch royal family in 1996.

Impressive for someone who has made it his life's purpose to be a vanguard for his country's official language, Bahasa Indonesia.

Born 75 years ago in Bandung, West Java, Anton's future hung by a thread when his parents announced that they could not afford to put him through university.

"My mother told me that if I wanted to go to university, I would have to look for a scholarship or work to pay for my studies," he said.

His break came when he came across an advertisement for a teaching post at a junior high school with an opportunity to study at university.

"In the afternoon, I taught English and math at the junior high school," said Anton, who at 24 became the school's director. He graduated from the University of Indonesia's Faculty of Letters in 1958, and became a lecturer in the university's Bahasa Indonesia department.

"I was compelled to be the gate keeper for Bahasa Indonesia, so that the linguistic principles of Bahasa Indonesia could be more orderly and followed by its speakers," he said. Anton eventually became head of the dictionary department at the Center for Language Development in 1960.

He also headed the drive to improve the spelling of Bahasa Indonesia between 1966 and 1972, and his contributions are still in use today.

After more than 40 years of dedication, however, he admitted that this aim had not been altogether successful.

"Indonesian people lack discipline. (They are) reluctant to follow rules," he lamented.

But his long labor has not all gone to waste: Indonesians now understand the difference between good Bahasa Indonesia and bad Bahasa Indonesia, and between formal and informal speech.

"People now know the difference, but this doesn't mean that they are capable of using (good language)."

Unfortunately for recent generations, the language we learn at school was never supported by adequate practice in its usage, for example in composition exercises.

"How can a person write a composition without ever practicing? Proficiency in a language can only be achieved through practice. It is just like driving a car -- I can understand the theory but that doesn't mean I can make it go," Anton explained.

As a consequence, Bahasa Indonesia is badly bastardized because of this incomplete education, he said, adding that it was his wish that the language would receive the prestige to which it was entitled.

"Indonesian people must feel that they can use the language to express their feelings and be proud to speak Bahasa Indonesia as an expression of identity," Anton said. Instead, many people still think that the language is incomplete, poor in vocabulary and underdeveloped compared to other languages of the world.

"The fact is, in expressing complex ideas educated Indonesians use English -- in this case because they understand English better, but also because they don't know how to translate their ideas into Indonesian," he said.

This did not mean that Indonesians should not learn other languages though, particularly English, which is the language of most of university textbooks today, he added.

Anton himself can speak at least three other languages besides the Bahasa Indonesia he loves: English, German and Dutch. He was even head of the German and Dutch departments at the University of Indonesia between 1989 to 1990 and between 1992 to 1995, respectively.

"Some 85 to 90 percent of academic books are still in English, yet (most) university students cannot read English, meaning that they graduate strictly from textbooks," Anton said, explaining that the underlying concern was the low level of education of its population.

He quoted statistics showing that some 75 percent of the national workforce have only an elementary school education, and criticized that efforts to improve education was only skin deep and did not touch the roots, which is teachers' education.

The same goes for good Bahasa Indonesia, Anton said, and although Bahasa Indonesia has become the mother tongue for about 25 percent of Indonesians above the age of seven, it is used in its informal version because no one, not even parents, bothered to teach otherwise.

"I think this is a big problem for Indonesia, not because I am a linguist, but because my heart is that of an educator. Education is an investment for the future," he said.