Sanskrit language (1)

Sanskrit language (1)

President Soeharto's recent warning on the unnecessary but
offensive use of foreign words on billboards or as names of
apartment buildings and other real estate projects could not have
happened at a more opportune time. Such use of foreign languages
reflects a tragic lack of respect for our national language,
especially considering that the advertisers or real estate owners
could have found suitable equivalents in Bahasa Indonesia with
little or no effort.

However, another aspect in the development of Bahasa Indonesia
which I find quite unfortunate is the continuing inclination to
use Sanskrit language on the part of certain people in the
government and the armed forces. Millions of Indonesians,
including myself, simply do not understand such Sanskrit phrases
as Eka Prasetya Pancakarsa, Jalesveva Jayamahe, etc. I remember a
former cabinet minister was complaining several years ago that he
felt like he was in a foreign country whenever he was inside the
House of Representatives building in Jakarta because all the main
halls and rooms in the building were given Sanskrit names. All
this in spite of Sanskrit virtually being a dead language. Some
99.99 percent of Indonesians do not understand it and even
hundreds of millions of Indians themselves (particularly those
who are Moslems or come from southern India) have no special love
or affinity for it.

So why is it that some Indonesians seem to love Sanskrit so
much? They should remember that Malay, or, rather, Old Malay, was
used as an official language in the Malay Empire of Sriwijaya
from as early as the seventh century A.D. Subsequently, but
mainly from the 15th to the 19th. centuries, it developed into a
classical literary language in the Malaccan Sultanate and the
Riau-Johore Kingdom and became at the same time the lingua franca
in the whole of the Nusantara Archipelago. Indeed, the adoption
of Malay in 1928 as Bahasa Indonesia was the culmination of a
long and old heritage of which we Indonesians should be proud.

In any event, to my Indonesian ears such Indonesian words as
Berbeda Tapi Bersatu sound a lot more beautiful than the Sanskrit
Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, which is our national motto. Furthermore,
this particular use of Sanskrit is quite ironical because in
Singapore, where ethnic Chinese make up 79 percent of the
population, their national motto and national anthem are all
written in Malay, not in Mandarin or Sanskrit!

Finally, the excessive use of Sanskrit or (Old) Javanese in
Bahasa Indonesia will undoubtedly make the latter more difficult
for our Malaysian neighbors to understand. This would be most
regrettable as Malaysians are not only our ethnic kin but also
our best partners in ASEAN and potential allies in the future. We
should therefore make every effort to promote the existing
similarities between the languages of the two countries and
refrain from driving them apart with the needless use of a dead
foreign language like Sanskrit.

MASLI ARMAN

Jakarta