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