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December 22, 2015 edition

My last column was about word doubling in Indonesian, but it is such a rich topic that I thought a double column about doubling was in order.
It's just that once you start looking for doubling in Indonesian, or tune your ear to it, you find it absolutely everywhere, and it functions in so many fascinating ways. We already talked about onomatopoeiasound words where the vowel changes, like we have in English (clip-clop, pitter-patter and so forth), and which Indonesian has in spades. We have also talked about doubling nouns as one way of making them plural. Then there are other doublings we discussed last time which create all kinds of nuances of meaning including: making actions reciprocal, or repeated; a sense of something being constant and ongoing; giving actions a sense of play or aimlessness; making things deliberately less specific, or sometimes precisely the opposite, making them more so.

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More Word Watch articles in other editions

November 24, 2015 edition

Jennifer Lindsay
One of the first phrases I learnt when I came to Indonesia was 'jalan-jalan', and I suspect it is still one of the first things tourists learn to say, along with 'lihat-lihat saja'. The first means 'walking [or driving] around', and the second means 'just looking'.

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November 3, 2015 edition

In a language like English (and most European languages) where expressing plural is obligatory, it is not surprising that there are special words to group thingsto make all those plurals a bit more manageable. Group classifiersor in English what we often call 'collective nouns'make many entities into one group. With them we can treat a plural subset as singular. So we have 'a flock of birds', 'a herd of cattle', 'a gaggle of geese', 'a fleet of ships', 'a gang of thieves' and so on. For animals and birds, English is particularly rich with ancient terms for groups. We don't get much opportunity to use them, more's the pity, but they are good for Trivial Pursuit or crossword questions: 'what do you call a group of larks?' (The answer is 'an exaltation'). And people have fun making them up. (What do you call a group of lawyers? An answer might be 'a pack', like 'a pack of wolves'.)
In a language like Indonesian-Malay where expressing plural is optional, it is not surprising that there is not the same need for classifiers to group (and manage) plural things. But instead, Indonesian and Malay have a rich array of classifiers to name single thingsto make nouns expressly singular and countable. So while in English we say, 'an [X] of things', in Indonesian-Malay, you say '[a single] thing'.

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