Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay - C. D. Grijns et al. (eds)

RUSSELL JONES (gen. ed.)

C.D. GRIJNS, J.W. de VRIES (eds)

Compiled by the Indonesian Etymological Project, KITLV

Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay

 

Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007

vli and 360 pp. ISBN 978 90 6718 304 8

€59.50 including DVD with Amoy dictionary and supplement

 

Reviewed by Stuart Robson, Monash University

Etymology is fun. Those who take an interest in Indonesian/Malay, one of the more important languages of Southeast Asia, will naturally be eager to learn more about its history. And one way to do that is to look at the words which it has borrowed from other languages over the centuries. So in this case etymology means tracing the origins of loanwords that derive from sources outside the Indonesian area (here called Nusantara) – borrowings from within the area, e.g. from Javanese, are not considered.

The loanwords were originally compiled in seven lists, namely: Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, Hindi, Tamil, Chinese, European and Japanese. Of these, Sanskrit, Arabic and European would be the main contributors in terms of numbers. Seeing that so many sources were involved, it is only to be expected that more than one person was needed to trace, list and explain the items. So it should be stressed that this was a ‘team effort’, indeed one lasting for many years, from the founding of the Etymological Project in 1973 up to the publication of this work. However, it is probably fair to say that it has been Russell Jones who was the driving force as general editor, and who saw the project through to its completion, and who himself devoted special attention to the Arabic-Persian and the Chinese lists. He has outlived most of the other scholars who contributed, and would want them all to be remembered and given their due.

The work as we have it is a consolidated list, which is built on the preceding lists source-language by source-language; in the Introduction (paragraphs 4.0 – 4.11) some background is provided for each area, forming a basis for further research. It should be noted that Arabic and Persian are closely linked, and it is sometimes difficult to determine from which source a given word came. Out of the European languages, Portuguese and Dutch are particularly interesting, but much of the terminology taken into contemporary Indonesian from ‘common’ European sources is not very informative. The loanwords from Chinese are excellently researched, complete with Chinese characters, and it is understood that a monograph by Russell Jones on this subject has just appeared in Kuala Lumpur, showing even the precise geographical origins of these words (Chinese loan-words in Malay and Indonesian, a background study). The words from Japanese date from World War II and are all obsolete.

How does one recognise a loanword in the first place? Some are obvious, but others less so, and in some cases a word may be so familiar that we do not realise that it is borrowed, as with cuci or sudah, which derive from Sanskrit. While the original forms are given, we are not told what the word meant in its original language – surely part of the story. Further, there are of course dubious cases, such as tata (rules); does it really come from Sanskrit tatha?

A type of loan not considered, but quite interesting, is the loan-translation or calque, where a new term is created using indigenous elements to express the meaning of a foreign term. There are many of these in Indonesian (often not recognised) taken from Dutch, of the type pengisap debu, vacuum cleaner, from Dutch ‘stofzuiger’ (=dust-sucker).

This publication may be regarded as the first step towards a full etymological dictionary of Indonesian/Malay. The significance of this study is that it helps us to see the language in a historical and social context, seeing that each wave of borrowings must have occurred in a particular time and setting, brought by people for particular reasons.  Examples are the early Sanskrit borrowings probably in the Sriwijaya period, the borrowings from Arabic and Persian during the time of the establishment of Islam in particular, and the ones from Dutch during the colonial period. But the processes may also be ‘out of period’; for example, Indonesian words are still being concocted from Sanskrit, and the influence of the Dutch language certainly continued after the Dutch themselves left. Linguistic history and cultural history are clearly linked.

It is worth mentioning that the Etymological Project in its time spawned the European Colloquia on Indonesian and Malay Studies, which were held every two years, circulating among various centres in Europe, beginning in Paris in 1978 and ending in Moscow in 1999. These were very valuable as venues for scholars to meet and present papers, while the leaders of the Etymological Project held their meeting on the last day, bringing people together who might not otherwise have had the opportunity.

 This book has been produced with loving care and precision, even with a hard cover, and is a worthwhile contribution to the ongoing task of studying the Indonesian/Malay language. 

The corpus of loan-words is available now on < http://sealang.net/indonesia/lwim >