peculiarities of our own languages

bilby commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

Would you like some Indonesian ones?

November 12, 2008

sarra commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

No reason why not. Are there any words in there for concepts other than the T-V distinction?

I asked a Spanish colleague about yeismo and cecear, and alas, there's no such term for the varying pronunciation of v as b/f.

November 24, 2008

bilby commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

Ooh yes!

The second person pronouns are complicated:

kamu - singular, informal

kalian - plural, informal

saudara/i - brother or sister, singular, used as 2pp, formal. Saudara is just the tip of the iceberg as there is a host of these, eg. abang - older brother, nenek - grandmother, adik - younger sibling, etc. But you get the picture.

saudara-saudari - brothers and sisters, plural, formal

engkau - literary, poetic

anda - singular or plural, impersonal

+proper name+ - neutral

+title & rank+ - respectful

The one that interests me here is anda. It was created by a linguist to try to come up with an all-purpose second person pronoun. Although it was concocted quite neatly from traditional Malay roots, it hasn't caught on the way it was intended. It is now used almost exclusively in advertising and on television to-camera pieces, ie. when the person being adressed is unknown to the speaker and therefore, logically, they are unable to make a refined choice as to which pronoun to use. In cases where the person adressed is known, Indonesians tend to go with one of the more traditional pronouns.

It's not solidified in the lexicon but I have heard at least one person complain about mengandakan. He described this as 'adressing a person by the impersonal pronoun, anda', rather than by a pronoun which connotes a relationship of intimacy or rank. I note that some radical groups have adopted anda as essential to their revolutionary ideals and as a protest against traditional ways of thinking and class systems that appear to be encoded in other pronominal choices. The effect, comrade Sarra, strikes some as being quite odd.

November 24, 2008

qroqqa commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

Nona, Nyonya, Pak, Bapak, Ibu . . .

November 25, 2008

bilby commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

All referred to in my comment on the 'saudara' category. It's a very productive category in the sense that regional varieties of Indonesian will pick up the words for brother, father, auntie, etc. from regional languages and use them as second person pronouns.

A noted case of this is bung, a Sundanese word meaning (elder) brother. It was and still is used to refer to Indonesia's first President Soekarno, ie. Bung Karno. Although Soekarno's exit from the political scene was dismal, he has always been admired as both a powerful orator and as the spirit of Indonesia's war of independence against the Dutch. During the 1990's, then President Soeharto - an urbane technocrat - and his similarly bland cabinet was in power. Ministers began referring to each other as bung in an attempt to pilfer some of that revolutionary aura. This tendency - to use Bung and a person's name in place of other options for second person pronoun - was described by the press as bungisasi, ie. bungisation.

November 25, 2008

sionnach commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

Well, Irish (and Scots Gaelic too, I'm fairly sure) has these delightful combined forms known as prepositional pronouns. These are exactly what they sound like - any given preposition will have a different word for its combination with each of the seven personal pronouns (1st, 2nd, 3rd person singular and plural; the extra one comes from distinguishing between male and female in the singular, but not in the plural).

Thus, for the preposition 'le', we have liom, leat, leis, léi, linn, libh, leo to mean with me, with you, ... with them.

for the preposition 'roimh' (before) it's romham, romhat, roimhe, roimpi, romhainn, romhaibh, rompu.

These suckers are truly nasty, and there's a gazillion of them:

Irish prepositional pronouns

Furthermore, there's no getting away from them, since most common verbs are prepositional - thus, for instance, to say "I'm hungry", one says "a hunger is upon me", or "Tá ocras orm".

# It gets worse: verbs also combine with personal pronouns, so that one can contract "Buaileann me" to "Buailim" and so forth.

# Then there are the two forms of the verb 'to be'; the regular form and the copula.

# And the vile rules for lenition, which require one to know the genders of all nouns (and the particular category to which they belong):

(Lenition means that the letter 'h' is inserted after certain letters which are suitable for lenition. For instance, 'fine weather' is 'aimsir bhreá'. The original word for 'fine' is 'breá' but this is lenited because 'aimsir' is a feminine word and it is a grammatical rule that feminine words lenite the following adjective, if lenitable.)

*** headache ****

November 25, 2008

sarra commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

bilby - thank you for your comments in particular, as revisiting them now I've found that some of the terms you discussed fit perfectly!

July 10, 2010

bilby commented on the list peculiarities-of-our-own-languages

Y'welcome sar.

July 13, 2010