Loan words in Bahasa Indonesia

Loan words in Bahasa Indonesia

Mr. Setiono's interesting and sensible article Loanwords:
Imperialism or modernization? in The Jakarta Post on Oct. 16,
1999 led me to think that two very important donor languages to
Bahasa Indonesia, those of Portuguese and Dutch, were overlooked.

Portuguese has provided Bahasa Indonesia with a considerable
vocabulary of household words, for example: meja (table), sepatu
(shoes) and mentega (butter) and not surprisingly many words
relating to boats such as: bendera (flag), bordu (gunwhale) and
tenda (tarpaulin/tent).

While Dutch has provided many technical words (and they sound
like it), principally relating to engineering and cars like
dongkrak (car jack), knalpot (muffler), busi (spark plug) and
administrative words like kantor (office), formulir (form) and
gubernur (governor). Many other administrative words like polisi,
immigrasi (basically all words ending in asi) are Dutch but
derived from French. This often causes people to think that they
are English words, which in turn have derived from French. Some
Indonesian words like gang (alleyway) have even stranger origins.
Originally a Dutch word exported to Indonesia, it actually
derives from Old Norse or High German for path.

Turning back to the article I fear the examples cited as being
English are all most likely of Dutch origin too, rather than
English, as explained above. The Dutch were in Indonesia for a
long time; a lot longer than oil companies and TV advertising
have been. Indonesia must never overlook that one of the greatest
vectors for introduction of foreign words and phrases into
Bahasa Indonesia was Bung Karno, Indonesia's first president. His
national day speeches are to this day legendary for their quotes
from every European language.

Not surprisingly, the greatest donor language to Bahasa
Indonesia over the past 30 years is almost certainly Javanese.
This is no bad thing, as they are a significant part of the
population. Indicative of this is the increase in thickness of
dictionaries over the past 30 years.

With all its loan words, Bahasa Indonesia today has become one
of the most vital and diverse languages in the world. In this
respect it is similar to English, the origins of which are also
multitude.

Hidup Bahasa Indonesia! (Long live Bahasa Indonesia!)

T.C. SCOTT

Jakarta