Elimination of loan words?

Elimination of loan words?

From Warta Kota

A mass media report recently carried a proposal that a
political decision should be made to eliminate loan words, by
finding the equivalents of foreign words in Indonesian. The
recommendation came from a meeting of linguists in October, which
was declared the month of national language.

The proposal is nothing new and in fact it is not realistic
either. If the experts wish to replace the words with Indonesian
equivalents, they can just do it but public acceptance is beyond
any compulsion.

In my view, such borrowings can enrich Indonesian, in terms of
vocabulary as well as meaning. Even the common words like Minggu
(Sunday), kursi (chair) and meja (table) are not Indonesian in
origin.

Therefore, we should have a language institute with sufficient
authority to handle our language development. This authority
should come from scientific competence instead of political
power, so that the blunders during the New Order period will not
recur. For instance, such words as "grand", "bakery" and
"boulevard" were just changed into gran, bakeri and bulevar. It
is ridiculous.

PAULUS S.
Depok, West Java