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The Straight Dope
Introduction
Welcome, new additions to the VIA family and to those of you visiting my home page. With this cover letter I wish to acquaint you with the following document entitled The Straight Dope on Bahasa Indonesia, first written by Harlan Thompson (Jember, '91-'93). With Harlan's stateside return I undertook the editing of this evolving work, modifying its structure and content somewhat from Harlan's original model. Prefacing this fourth edition are explanations of the Dope's purpose, scope, changes, and special features, as well as some final suggestions of my own.
What's it for?
The Dope is meant primarily to inform you of the common and the colloquial. This purpose is born of two things. First, words simply pulled out of an English-Indonesian dictionary may not, in fact, be commonly used in modern speech; thus the Dope attempts to give you a foundational lexicon which will help to steer you away from idiosyncrasies. Secondly, often incredibly basic words habitually used in the home are neglected in the classroom, which can lead to embarrassment; hence the addition of colloquial forms.
Limitations
However, there are several factors which limit our ability to design a concise language resource of this type. The Dope has been compiled by two non-native speakers, and though I have spent considerable time (over four years now) in four very different areas of Indonesia, the nature of individuals is to speak manneristically according to the dialect of their area and the personal language framework they appropriate. While I have done my best to confirm the appropriateness of the words in the Dope and to include only pervasive, pan-Indonesian colloquial forms, the Dope may not yet be free of idiosyncrasies, particularly those born of Harlan's experience in Jember. Hence, you may find words and phrases herein not common to your area. The problem of dialect and local language also insures that you will find many words and phrases extremely common to your area but which are not included in the Dope. This problem I hope to treat in later editions with expanded Bahasa Daerah (local language) sections to be printed separately, one for each vol going to a certain area. One such pamphlet already exists for Kupang, but there have been few contributions from other areas.
The Dope is by no means complete. Right off the bat one notices a deficiency of nouns. As Harlan wrote in the original introduction, that "depends on what's around you." The Dope also lacks sections on numbers, days of the week, and other standard matters which should be covered during your stateside or Yogya language studies. Put another way, Monday is always Monday; the real difficulty for the language learner is whether it is more normal to say "valerian" or "pink", "speak" or "rap", "mengatakan" or "bilang". In addition, Harlan and I continually have discovered crucial missing words. How is it that prior to this edition we overlooked the inclusion of punya (to have) or coba (to try)? No doubt other words have been overlooked.
You can imagine, then, how difficult it has been in editing to keep The Dope "straight"! Deciding what to include and what to abandon sometimes has been painful in our attempt to fashion a document which is both concise and faithful to in-country language experience. The acid test has always been, When was the last time I heard this word spoken? Words with many common synonyms present a particular problem, since we want to give the learner a broad base of tools. In fact one hammer is enough when you wish to pound out your own ideas, but what of understanding others? In some cases, therefore, I have listed related words together, judging their frequent usage justification enough for their inclusion, perhaps to the exclusion of a nifty but less common word. Whenever possible I have listed first the words I felt most common.
Other Features
Another feature of this third edition is the reorganization of the original long lists into smaller units, and a rough ordering of units according to their utility. (Give the whole Dope a perusing, however. You will find end sections like The Dope on Food or The Twenty Questions interesting from your first day in Indonesia.) There are also new sub-sections founded upon parallels in word form or in field of meaning which drew words out of their original alphabetical Adjective or Verb lists. While yet imperfect, hopefully these new groupings will prove sensible to the incoming volunteer, and, while falling short of a fully planned course, provide an improved degree of logic and sense to the Dope .
Again I wish to stress that the Dope is necessarily the product of prejudiced experience. I therefore invite you all to assemble and contribute your editorial comments as you follow your own language trail. Notes on dialect and local languages will be especially appreciated.
Typographical Conventions
Some notes on the text: A (J) indicates that a word is of Javanese dialect, and so should be used with caution in areas hostile towards Javanese. (Nevertheless, because Java is a powerful influence in Indonesia, and we all will spend time there, many such words have made The Dope.) Other abbreviations follow the conventions established by John Echols and Hasan Shadily in their indispensable Indonesian-English Dictionary.
As your tutors will happily explain, words in Indonesian may be transformed by the addition of affixes. Prefixes in particular can affect the spelling of words. To clarify this and to help you learn how prefixes affect spelling, this matter is illustrated through the listing of verbs with their me- prefixes. In the case of a verb which employs a static prefix, or which may be used readily either in the root or expanded me- form, the root and prefix have been separated by a space:
meng ambil : to take
be kerja : to work
So at once we learn me + a-verbs becomes menga----, and that we can say either "Buku itu saya mau ambil" OR "Saya mau mengambil buku" and retain the meaning "take" in both cases (proper usage of roots and me- forms lies outside the scope of The Dope). If the verb requires its prefix in order to retain its stated meaning, no space has been allowed:
mengajar : to teach
berangkat : to leave
This way we know that we cannot say "Saya angkat" and have it mean the same thing as "Saya berangkat" ("angkat" as a root means "to lift", not "to leave".) If a verb's spelling is dynamic, the root and me + root forms are both written separately:
tukar/ menukar : to exchange
suruh/ menyuruh : to order, command
This prevents us from confusing "ukar" or as the root of "menukar", which could happen if we wrote "men ukar". This method of notation also allows for inductive learning of me + root spelling changes. In all cases verbs have been listed alphabetically according to their root, just as in a dictionary.
Helpful Hints
Lastly, I have a few suggestions for you. The first is that you buy the Cornell University Press's edition of Echols and Shadily's An Indonesian-English Dictionary. The stateside edition is more expensive than the one available here, but the quality is far better: no missing pages, thumbable paper, fine black ink, no funky hard-to-read page colors, a good binding-- and you have the benefit of the dictionary as you study in the States. I suggest this book because it will familiarize you with the way affixes in Indonesian change the spelling and direction of a word's meaning; furthermore, its explanations are well and wittily worded and it abounds with idioms and examples. Guaranteed to become your Bible and Best Friend. (About $30 from Cornell-- at least, it was back in 1992.) The English-Indonesian version is also great, but translating from English to Indonesian can lead us astray. Best save your money: just use words you hear people here using, and buy a cheap-o pocket dictionary for those occasional times you must dig up the Indonesian "equivalent" of an English concept.
My second suggestion is that you not hesitate to begin your studies now. The effort you expend now will be returned to you n- fold your first few months in-country. Using a lab will give you a foundation in pronunciation which will be difficult to acquire on noisy streets. However, have no fear: Vols I have seen stumble through their first six months (coming in with little or no preparation) I have also seen develop a most amazing flair for the language. Just be forwarded that although Indonesian is easier than Chinese or Czech (so they say), it still is a foreign language; do not expect to "absorb it through osmosis, dude" your first month here. It takes effort, and stateside effort will be well worth it, as you will be coming here directly enough.
Thirdly, if you are at UCSC, there is a great book in the library written by Yohanni Johns, and the lab has the entire cassette series on file. Free! Maybe Stanford or other universities have similar resources; take the time to seek them out.
Close
Sudahlah! This preface is overlong, I know. Consider it a letter from
me to you introducing The Straight Dope which you can detach
and dispose of or file away, according to your custom. I hope the Dope proves
useful to you, something to grab hold of, 18 pages to hold up to the hundreds
in your dictionary. And I hope that your teachers won't feel their work
belittled by a document which implies a hundred word list can supplant "real"
instruction. For that is a myth: Indonesian is rich, if unexploited; ultimately
every word in the Kamus Besar has its place.
Oesapa, 25 March 1994
(with minor changes 3/28/96)
Preface to the Fourth Edition
New computing technology has made it possible to revise this fourth edition of The Dope in just a few days. Layout has been streamlined, with the font enlarged for easier reading, yet using the same number of pages. The totally kacau-balau Explanations and Examples section has been replaced by easier to navigate Endnotes. A superscripted number indicates an endnote discussion of the given word's usage, except for an occaisional superscripted "2" indicating a doubled word (ie., bolong2 = bolong-bolong). Some deletions have been made, notably the Bahasa Daerah (Local Languages) section. It is still available upon request.
I hope this is the best Dope yet. Let me know what you think.
James
Maumere, 28 March 1996
Notes on the .pdf version of The Dope
Putting the Dope in Adobe's Portable Document Format has proven both advantageous and a nuisance. The benefits include:
- links, which allow you to jump directly to a topic from the table of contents, or to an endnote directly from its reference;
- article paths, which allow you to enter and scroll through the columns for easy on-screen viewing; and
- availablility over the World Wide Web in a compact form ready to print and carry about.
However, making corrections is proving more difficult. My apologies for any errors you may find-- they do exist!
Some of the known problems:
- In the table of contents, the heading for the "Just Say No" section is missing. It should follow the section "This n That".
- Page four's section on place/location which precedes the section on getting around lacks a heading either there or in the table of contents.
- A few twos which should be superscripted (to indicate doubling of a word) are not.
Any comments or suggestions would be much appreciated. Feel free to add
notes to the original document and/or email me.
James
Kupang, Timor, Indonesia
30 June 1996