Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia • Hacker News Board

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#101

Post by chewxy » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 9:59 PM UTC

Anyone interested in conlangs would do well to study Malay. It is not a constructed language per se, but modern standard Malay (Bahasa baku) underwent a massively interesting standardization phase in the 60s which resulted in a fairly consistent language today.

By contrast the standardization of Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia baku) looks comical. The rules of Indonesian are all over the place.

Unfortunately in Malaysia, modern spoken and indeed modern written Malay has gone the same way Indonesian has gone - textspeak and internet lingo made all the standardization efforts in vain. But from an intellectual point of view, standardized Malay has very nice consistent properties to it - it's a lot harder on rules than English.

For example in English there are no rules on nounification of verbs. In Malay, you simply wrap the lemma of the verb between "per...an" - so speak "kata"(meaning speak) becomes "perkataan" (meaning words). There are clearly also rules regarding spelling - "cegah" (deter) becomes "pencegahan" (deterrence) instead of "percegahan", but by and large the standards are sane and doesn't have very many exceptions, or have exceptions that can actually be encoded by rules (unlike English where it's I before E except before C, except that's not true at all).

And the best part about the standardization is that it doesn't shun the heritage of the language. There are a lot of Australasian aboriginal linguistic features that made the cut and got improved in my opinion.

Take for example, the linguistic feature that is repeated across many Australasian aboriginal languages: repeating a word to indicate a higher count.

"Laki" as a root word means "man". "Laki laki" means... "men". The standardization process that happened in the 50s formalized a rule that had been in the language earlier - "Lelaki" means "men". Interestingly here's a Indonesian grammar blog that discusses this: https://www.katabaku.com/2016/05/laki-laki-atau-lelaki-yang-... (TL;DR - "lelaki" is "true" while "laki-laki" is canonical form)

In Malaysia, the word "laki-laki" is no longer being used. Instead the language and community converged upon using the word "lelaki", which is a more succint and elegant way of using it.

TL;DR - Malay went through a very nice standardization process while Indonesian went through in my opinion, a not-as-well-thought-of standardization process.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#102

Post by singingfish » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:09 PM UTC

darcys22 wrote: post #99

singingfish wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I kind of get the feeling indonesian democracy is in a healthier state than american democracy.

Based on what?

Based on what I know about Indonesian politics and American politics. I grew up in Indonesia for a while during the Soeharto regime, and have maintained an interest since.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#103

Post by jcranmer » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:10 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #79

astrodust wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification. It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different. Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that h…

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification I don't know if gentrification is the right word. Maybe death by standardization. The big breakthrough that made McDonald's a successful company was coming up with processes and supply chains that allowed its food to be predictable. Before McDonald's, when you drove across the country and stopped at a burger joint, you never knew what the food would be like. Today,…

> With the exception of Russia and Georgia, it's said that no two nations that have McDonald's have ever gone to war.

And NATO and Yugoslavia, the US and Panama, Israel and Lebanon, and Russia and Ukraine. One could even argue Qatar and Saudi Arabia at this point.

Of course, it should be noted that the attitude of globalization preventing (major) war from breaking out isn't new--at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a quite common view that Europe was too economically intertwined for war to break out. Instead, three of the bloodiest and most destructive wars in history broke out.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#104

Post by robocat » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

lainga wrote: post #12

shp0ngle wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Mandarin Chinese understood on all China, from Xinjiang to Canton?

Yes, but it exists alongside other dialects spoken locally which are sort of mutually intelligible, but in some cases only when written (cf. Cantonese). It's analogous to large parts of the US outside the Northeast Corridor using various dialects of American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English, but only among people from their home city, and also having varying degrees of command over s…

> American Sign Language, which is written the exact same as American English

ASL is an utterly different language from English. Your sentence is equivalent to saying that because a person speaks Cantonese but writes English, Cantonese is the same as English.

"English can be represented through fingerspelling or artificial systems like Signed Exact English or Cued Speech. But these are codes for spoken or written language, not languages themselves." from http://mentalfloss.com/article/13107/7-things-you-should-kno...

It is a common misconception, because English speaking people are generally taught Signed Exact English and see it used for real time translation, but that has no grammatical crossover with ASL.

Oliver Sacks wrote a fabulous book on the subject: Seeing Voices.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#105

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:18 PM UTC

quacked wrote: post #90

reaperducer wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

despite all that, there is still a huge amount of diversity in the US This is true. The more you travel, the more you encounter this. Chili in Cincinnati is not even remotely the same at chili in Houston. (Key ingredients in Houston are meat, chili powder, and tomato paste. Key ingredients in Cincinnati are chocolate, allspice, cinnamon, spaghetti, and cheddar cheese.) Breakfast meat in eastern Pennsylvania is scrapp…

I dunno. This is a topic I'm pretty passionate about. I'm extremely well-traveled within the US and have a lot of good friends from different states, and the tiny regional differences that you're mentioning are frustratingly bland compared to, say, the cultural differences between northern and southern France. And even there, the relentless pace of branded technology and products is increasing, to the point where in…

>because they're all slowly becoming the same, when they used to be so different.

Welcome to the modern world. This will eventually happen everywhere. It's easy for places to be different when they were separated by days or weeks of travel time. Now ideas can be transferred in seconds and the entire US can be traversed in days. Regional factories used to supply the area around them. Now one part made in China can be supplied anywhere on the planet.

The past was like the past because of logistics. The future is looking much different.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#106

Post by AmericanChopper » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:19 PM UTC

This article is hyperbolic and opinionated at best, and ignorant at worst. A vast majority of the country speaks Bahasa Indonesia as either a first or second language. You have to go to very remote villages to find people who don’t speak it.

The author’s idea that Indonesians have other “options” of languages to speak if they don’t like Bahasa Indonesia is also laughable. People will generally know their own particular ethnic language, and may choose to speak it when they are only around others who speak it too, in the home for instance. But people rarely elect to learn a second local language that they didn’t grow up speaking.

Bahasa Indonesia is used very widely, partly because the opportunity to use local languages is quite restricted, especially in cities, where the populations are much more diverse. Regions tend to have their own localised slang, but I think that’s true everywhere in the world.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#107

Post by Rapzid » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:24 PM UTC

Apocryphon wrote: post #47

khuey wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indonesia is poor, far away, not particularly significant geopolitically, and there's no large Indonesian diaspora in the West outside of the Netherlands. A large portion of Indonesian-Americans are actually ethnically Chinese.

It's a huge country in terms of both population and land, and with abundant natural resources including oil. It's the largest Muslim nation in the world, and also has significant numbers of religious minorities. It's adjacent to many other eastern and southeastern Asian markets. There's definitely interest to be had there.

Largest Muslim-majority nation. However, they are on a frightening trajectory towards becoming a Muslim nation. Their democracy is on increasingly thinning ice.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#108

Post by pixl97 » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:25 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #51

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

Wow, your description of the US culture is very scary. Like an exaggeratedly dystopian future. We have many problems in Europe, but this senseless uniformization is, by far, not as complete as it seems to be in the U.S.

There is no senseless uniformity. It really makes complete sense when you look at it from a logistics prospective. Why have 5 regional factories making things slightly different when you can make one large factory and exploit the efficiencies of scale and the countries transportation networks.

The US has been pretty easy to cross since WWII. It is very easy for goods to travel through states. Europe, as a whole has not, though the formation of the EU has helped.

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#109

Post by luord » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #58

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification. It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different. Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that h…

> This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification.

As someone hailing from an apparently more "heterogeneous" country than the USA, I gotta ask: Death of what?

Re: Why standard Indonesian is not spoken throughout Indonesia

#110

Post by vintagedave » Wed, Jul 04, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #58

temp-dude-87844 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a lot to be said for shared institutions like government, religion, retail and media. You can drive to the other coast, and during your four or five-day journey, you will decent roads and useful signage; truck stops from same 5 chains (in truth, only 3 different companies) with reliable bathrooms, fuel, and drinks; restaurants from the same dozen chains serving familiar food; Walmarts where you can be in…

This isn't progress, this is death by gentrification. It's utterly sad that the same chain stores, the same shops, the same products are sold coast to coast, that the menus of most restaurants have basically zero variation from Louisiana to Arizona to California to Maine, places that historically could not be more different. Now you can land in some random city in the US and apart from a few very small pockets that h…

> I want to visit an America where I can't understand what they're saying even though it's allegedly English, where you need to work at it, absorb the local dialect. Where they have strange terms for things that you need to learn to fit in.

Try visiting an English-speaking country that's not America. I suggest that because the inverse was true for me:

In 2010, I (Australian) ended up in a hotel somewhere between Mobile, Alabama and Pascagoula, Mississippi on my way to Pascagoula to go sailing for work. First time in America. In the morning, I wanted breakfast, and saw a Waffle House at a truck stop over the highway from the hotel. I knew them from films but I'd never been to one. I wandered in, and tried to order.

The waitress could not understand my accent, and I could not understand hers. I ended up ordering by pointing at the menu. Then I ate waffles with bacon and maple syrup (what a crazy mixture. I've had it since, but that was the first time) while listening to Southern accents around me, only 3/4 of which I could decipher. Let me tell you, hearing Southern accents in movies or TV did not prepare me for a random, back-of-nowhere truck stop outside a small town in Mississippi.

You might be able to get the same experience in a small town out back somewhere in Australia. Who knows. Try it :)