Use your language

Use your language

The letter of a reader in The Jakarta Post of April 20, 1995, just doesn't leave my mind. I feel I had to say something about Borrowing to enrich. I agree completely in that living languages are apt to borrow foreign words when there are no words in the original one with the same connotation. I am not a purist myself, but I still regard it essential that the borrowed word should be assimilated within the language over a period of time, before it can be recognized as part of the language. This indeed will enrich any language. It's the copy-cat attitude that should be avoided.

This reminded me of an encounter I had over 50 years ago. It was during the Japanese occupation when one day a few friends and I, all between six and 10 years old, were walking on the beach. Actually we were not strolling but almost running because we had to pass a Japanese officer's guest-house. And that always scared us. Suddenly we saw a Japanese officer standing under a coconut tree right in front of us. I said something in Dutch to my friends and instantaneously this man, whose name I still remember, started shouting. We froze, immediately there were Japanese soldiers all around us. We were herded in a friendly way into the backyard of the compound across the street. My friends started crying. I didn't cry but was so petrified that I could hardly walk. Holding hands with each other, we made it. This man still yelling and screaming ordered us to stand in a row, five or six of us. He went into the house to get his samurai. Pulling it out of the scabbard, he murmured something which sounded like a prayer. I heard screams from my friends and they leaned heavily on me. He could have beheaded us right then and there with no one accusing him of murder.

I had seen many beheaded corpses washed up on the shore so often and I have seen our people dying on the streets, not from hunger, but from being beaten with wooden clubs for petty crimes they committed. One for stealing a banana.

No one was allowed to come near them, they were guarded with open bayonets. We knew who the masters were. With this in mind I faced this cruel man, who kept screaming, while pointing his samurai over and over again at us. His words were gibberish to me. I didn't understand a word. But I recognized in the stream of noise "Oct. 28, 1928". His gestures became wilder and wilder. Then abruptly he transformed himself into a nice man and let us go.

It took us all a long time to get over the nightmares.

But many, many years later it dawned on me that maybe he was trying to say something to us. The body language I remember so well conveyed messages I only now recognize. The overall effect seemed to say: "Be proud of your own language, no one can have an identity without his/her own language and without an identity you'll always be mastered. You proclaimed a language of your own (no wonder I recognized Oct. 28, 1928). Use it!" Through that horrible ordeal I learned a lesson.

Or perhaps it wasn't Tsu Tsui who taught me a lesson, perhaps it is I who likes to think: "Keep Indonesian, Indonesian to remain Indonesian."

INA SUMARSONO

Jakarta