'Imlek' a misnomer

Being a Chinese-Indonesian, I must compliment your reporter on the page one article Govt declares 'Imlek' as national holiday (The Jakarta Post, Feb. 18, 2002) and the news coverage in the same issue.

But Imlek is, in effect, a misnomer. As your editorial and reporting are more often than not transcribed by your respectable peers in Southeast Asia, I feel the need to make a correction.

Imlek is the word for lunar calender. Thus what we call Chinese New Year is in the fact the Lunar New Year. By the same token the word "Mandarin" has been misused as the Chinese national language, which, as a matter of fact, is to denote the Peking (Beijing) dialect as decreed by the Qing government to be spoken by the mandarins in the former empire.

LIEM SIAN TIE

Jakarta