The Plural in Indonesian: It’s More Complicated than You Think Indonesian language textbooks often suggest that forming the plural in Indonesian is very simple. All…
Posts published in “Author”
Instead of asking mengapa? or the more colloquial kenapa? (why?), you may as well ask karena apa? (because of what?; what for?; why): Although karena…
The term syukur originates from the Arabic word shukran (شكراً), meaning ‘thank you’. So, what sets it apart from terima kasih, the conventional Indonesian expression…
Numbers with decimal point and thousand separator |n numerous English-speaking nations, including former British and American colonies, a full-stop (period) is used to denote the…
What is the equivalent of the second person pronoun you in Indonesian? It turns out that there are a lot of answers to this question.…
At least for people speaking colloquial Indonesian, mau (normally pronounced mo) can be used both to express a desire (“want”) and also to express an intention (“will”). What is happening here? Can words just arbitrarily change their meaning?
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of speech. Articulation refers to the mechanics of makings sounds for speech. In formal Indonesian, a prefix me- that is used with transitive verbs is pronounced in different ways depending on what verb it attaches to.
A polyglot is someone who speaks a lot of languages. Some polyglots are linguists, and some linguists are polyglots. But I’m the kind of linguist who is not a polyglot. Language learning is not particularly easy or fun for me. It’s more of an occupational hazard than an end in itself.
When I talk to people about studying Indonesian in Jakarta, one of the most common responses is something like: “You know, what they teach you in the classroom is totally different from what you hear on the streets!”
I’ve heard some exaggerated claims like, “Every word is pronounced exactly how it’s spelled,” or “Each letter is always pronounced the same way.” That’s normally true, but it’s not always the case.
Borrowing words is not a sign of any linguistic defect. It is natural response to the need to express new concepts. Rather than weakening a language, borrowing actually strengthens it.
This word is difficult to find in the dictionaries because the “proper” form is actually “gemas”. Gemes is the Jakartanese pronunciation. The word describes the…