Why the Indonesian language is written in roman script?
Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at
12:25 am
are they culturally so poor that they don't even have a script of their own or there is some obsolete script?
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Filed under: Indonesian Language
well, Bahasa Indonesia is basically from Malayan. before we use Malayan there’s a language called "palapa" it’s actually like Indians and its written on rocks or leaves by our ancestor. i don’t really know how it become Malay and Bahasa Indonesia. maybe it’s because lots of our word is from English, and other example: "Coffee" in Bahasa Indonesia become: "kopi" and one thing i know in October 28, 1928 Indonesians declared that "#1 We, Indonesians declares: we are one nation; Indonesian. #2 We, Indonesians declares: we use one language: Bahasa Indonesia and #3 we, Indonesians declares: Indonesia as our home land"
and I totally don’t agree with you, we (Indonesians) are not poor, a lot of language using roman script too like English, Malayan, etc.
and the advantage of Bahasa Indonesia using a roman script is we are able to study English faster than people who had their own script (it’s my experience while learning Japanese, and my sensei (Japanese teacher) also said that English is not easy for Japanese, because they had different script so they have to learn ABC from beginning)
even tough we’re using roman script but the pronunciation is different from others… and roman script is from the roman…
Dutch colonialism is largely responsible for the use of Roman alphabet for written Indonesian. Indonesian takes influence from many languages, especially Malay, and prior to Dutch colonisation, Indonesian was written in many scripts including Arabic (from the influence of Islam) and a script resembling Hindi. The Indonesian script was standardised to the Roman alphabet in the 1930s as part of the shift toward independent governance.
Because they share the same root language.
I wondered that too,we just printed a book for that market.I just sort of figured they didn’t have a written language until the colonial era,because I noticed a lot of english and what looked like dutch technical words,like engin for engine…
The reason – Dutch colonialism, as stated below. Previously, there were scripts based on Arabic alphabet (though containing three extra letters – known as ‘Jawi’) and before that, various scripts of Indian origin.
Of course English is, by your lights, perhaps, also ‘culturally poor’ in that it adopted the alphabet invented by the Romans for the Latin language.
Anyone who can suggest Indonesia is culturally poor has obviously never been there and lives in cloud cuckoo land.