Sanskrit and Indonesian
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