Back in the Marcos days, the Filipino government was publicizing what it referred to as Pilipino (and the spelling is accurate, thanks) as a “national language” – while I didn’t read much about it, what I did see gave me the impression that it was apparently similar to Nynorsk and Bahasa Indonesia – a manufactured language closely based on the major indigenous language (in this case Tagalog) with admixtures of related tongues (Cebuano and Visayan, IIRC) and a technical vocabulary drawn from world commerce and depending heavily on English.
Are they still pushing that idea? Has it been totally dropped?
Gwar? I knew some people that were involved with SIL; from what I could tell, they translated the Bible into Language X, developing a print for the language if one didn’t exist. How do you feel it harms cultures?
Bahasa Indonesia (and the very closely related Bahasa Malaysia) is actually based on a very obscure Indonesian language spoken by a few thousand people. The reason it was chosen was that the vocabulary and grammar was very simple. It was thus easy to learn and easy to adapt. Politically, it was probably successful because virtually everyone had to learn it, including the majority Javanese. Minorities did not feel like it was being imposed upon only them. (The latter is MHO.)
“Pilipino” went the opposite route. It was based on Tagalog, with its enormously complicated system of moods, tenses, prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. Though some lip-service was given to including other languages, basing the national language on Tagalog made it a political hot-potato. The Philippines is much more ethnically diverse; although Tagalog is spoken by more Filipinos than any other language, it is by no means the majority language. Also, the language institute would often prescribe some supremely unrealistic words. My favorite is the word for chair: salumpuwit (literally, “ass-catcher”). Most people would use upu-an (“place to sit”) or maybe silya (from the Spanish silla, “chair”).
In 1989 (post-Marcos), the government decreed that the national language would henceforce be known as “Filipino”. The P-F transition was an acknowledgement that words of foreign origin could and would be integrated into the language. New sounds and words were incorporated into the alphabet, though many still have trouble pronouncing sounds like “f”, “v”, “th”, and “j”. What exactly constitutes “Filipino” is still a matter of some confusion, and everyone just ignores it and speaks what they will. Hence, the linguistic mish-mash noted by the OP.
Terminus Est, your history of the Malay language is a bit garbled.
The original home of the Malay language is the Riau Islands, a small archipelago of small islands just to the east of Sumatra and south of Singapore and Malaysia. It is also a native language on part of Sumatra’s east coast near there.
The Malay population of Malaysia mostly originated from Sumatra, so the Malay language spread over Singapore and the peninsula that way. Other languages spoken in Sumatra, like Minangkabau and Aceh, are closely related to Malay. Malay also became the language of Brunei on the island of Borneo, though how it became established there I’m not sure. The northern Borneo languages range from Iban in Sarawak, closely related to Malay, through a series of dialects until the languages of Sabah in northeastern Borneo are similar to nearby Philippine languages in the Sulu archipelago. So to reconnect with the OP, there is a dialect continuum from Malay to Tagalog if you go across Borneo and the Sulu Archipelago to Mindanao and then Luzon.
Anyway, the Malay language has been spoken by millions of people across a very wide area for several centuries. A simplified pidgin version of it called Bazaar Malay became the lingua franca for trade across Indonesia. This was the main reason Malay was chosen to become the national language Bahasa Indonesia upon independence. It was the only language that was familiar nationwide. Besides, its system of pronouns and registers of politeness are simpler and easier to handle than Javanese, which has five registers of politeness — you have to use the language differently depending on your exact ranking in the social hierarchy relative to the person you’re talking to. Use one set of vocabulary and pronouns with royalty, a different set with the nobility, another set with respectable people of your own class, different again with your friends, and different yet again with servants. This could only function in a highly stratified society and was not applicable everywhere in Indonesia. Malay was much simpler and could catch on easier.
Yes, the original birthplace of the Malay language was a small area, but it had already grown to be the major regional language long before it was chosen as Indonesia’s national language.
Jomo, thanks for the clarification. I was going by dimly-remembered information communicated to me by my father, who lived in Indonesia for five years and learned Bahasa. Sadly, my knowledge of the language is limited to satu, duwa, tiga.
Care to hazard a guess why use of Bazaar Malay did not extend north to the Philippine archipelago?
> Ethnologue part of SIL International, a fundamentalist Christian
> organisation that strongly favours dangerously sending
> missionaries to some of the world’s most fragile cultures.
> Information about language families can be found elsewhere
> on the web, there’s no need to support a controversial
> organisation that - seeing how the SDMB likes to fight
> fundamentalism - most of us should abhor.
Give me a break. First, show me a website that has as detailed a family tree for all the world’s languages as Ethnologue has. Second, the SDMB does not have a mission of “fighting fundamentalism.” If you don’t like fundamentalism, fine, but don’t try to claim that that’s the purpose of the SDMB. Third, refusing to use some information resource because you don’t like the resource’s political positions is cutting off your nose to spite your face. I don’t have to even think about, let alone agree with, the political positions of Ethnologue when I make use of it. Fourth, show me that the SIL is endangering fragile cultures.
Regarding the A-S/ON split, I think you are wrong. It can’t be in AD. Think about it. You are saying that “Germanic” existed as a language into the 1st century AD w/o ever splintering. No way. Has to be at least 1000 BC. “Germanic” is a first generation split from I-E. Neither of us has a cite, but I’ll find one tomorrow and we’ll see when the split is thought to have occurred.
Looks like you were closer than me in pinpointing the A-S/ON split.
"Around the second century BC this common Germanic language split into three distinct sub-groups: East Germanic, North Germanic West Germanic " according to this site.
I’d be interested if anyone has some knowledge of exactly how mutually intelligible these two languages would’ve been. We’re talking about 1000 years or slightly less between the linguistic split and the “reunification” under the Danish invasion and rule of (parts of) England.