Sanskrit and Indonesian
This is a reply to Mr B.M. Menon's letter (The Jakarta Post, June 12, 1995), which was itself a response to my earlier letter on the use of Sanskrit in Bahasa Indonesia (The Jakarta Post, June 9, 1995).
Let me deal first with the first two points raised by Mr Menon at the beginning of his letter. First he stated that: "Contrary to what Mr Arman thinks, Indian Moslems speak Urdu (very similar to Hindi)..." This is a very strange statement since nowhere in my letter did I say, indicate or hint that Indian Moslems spoke any language other than Urdu, as indeed any high school student would know that Urdu is the main language of Indian Moslems. All I said was: "...even hundreds of millions of Indians themselves (particularly those who are Moslems or come from southern India) have no special love or affinity for Sanskrit."
Nevertheless I think it is quite misleading for Mr Menon to claim that Urdu is very similar to Hindi. It is a well known fact that the Moslem influx into northern India from the 13th century onwards has prompted the rise of a hybrid colloquial language known as Hindustani, from which two languages, Hindi and Urdu, evolved. Yet Urdu differs linguistically from Hindi because Hindi is heavily effected by Sanskrit (the sacred language of the Hindus) and written in the Devanagari script, whereas Urdu pervasively influenced by Persian and Arabic (the language of the holy book of Islam) and written in the Persian Arabic script.
It was in view of these linguistic differences, as well as the differences in cultural and religious associations, that I wrote that Indian Moslems have no special love or affinity for Sanskrit. Further I also made a similar reference about the attitude of the Dravidian speaking southern Indians towards Sanskrit or Sanskritized Hindi, a fact attested by their refusal to accept the Indian government's attempt to make Hindi as the sole official language of India. The important question now is why is it some Indonesians seem to love Sanskrit so much while hundreds of millions of Indians don't.
The second point raised by Mr Menon was his chauvinistic assertion that Sanskrit was the "Mother of languages." My long held understanding is that the Indo-Aryan languages of northern India, of which Sanskrit is the root, are part of the Indo- Iranian group of languages which, in turn, belongs to the larger Indo-European language family. In this scheme of things, it would certainly be correct to say that Sanskrit is the mother language of such languages as Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali and Rajasthani, but to claim, as Mr Menon seems to do, that Sanskrit is also the mother language of other Indian as well as South East Asian and Germanic languages would be patently wrong.
I am afraid the rest of Mr Menon's letter was really unnecessary, because he either badly missed the point of my letter or was merely trying to score a cheap debating point by suggesting that I probably want to eliminate all Sanskrit and other foreign words from Bahasa Indonesia, such words as suami (husband), wanita (woman), supir (driver), meja (table) etc. No Indonesian in his right mind would want to do that because those words have been deeply entrenched in our vocabulary and certainly no Indonesian thinks of them as foreign anymore.
I think Bahasa Indonesia should and will continue to borrow foreign words for sometime in the future, to represent ideas or concepts for which, strictly speaking, Bahasa Indonesia equivalents do not yet exist. I would suggest that the great majority of this new borrowing, perhaps as much as 80 percent should be taken from English in view of its preeminent standing as the international language. The remaining 20 percent could be borrowed from the Javanese and other local languages at an approximate ratio of 40 to 60 (since the population of Indonesia consists of 40 percent ethnic Javanese and 60 percent non- Javanese). In any case, for reason previously explained, I do not see any reason to borrow anymore from Sanskrit in the future.
MASLI ARMAN
Jakarta