Language and politics

I refer to the article Government abolishes anti-Chinese rules (The Jakarta Post, May 8, 1999), which states that President B.J. Habibie has issued an instruction to lift an almost three-decade ban on the use and teaching of Mandarin and the discriminative citizenship requirements for Chinese-Indonesians. It is of interest to me because I am interested in the study of linguistics.

Mandarin Chinese, just like many other languages in the world, is a property of human culture, which is invaluable to study not only for the sake of communication but also for the improvement of human historical records.

The Chinese language belongs among the tonal languages, which are notably beautiful to listen to so long as they are spoken with a correct and acceptable pronunciation. And they, theoretically, should be able to convey good and clear messages and achieve goals of communication among speakers of the language. Note that the best means of communication should be the one which is highly communicative and phonologically beautiful. After all, language is a part of the arts and any form of arts reflects beauty. Humans love beauty.

Language should better be separated from politics because language is part of liberal arts and science which deserves further analysis, especially at universities offering linguistics departments.

ODO FADLOELI

Bandung, West Java