I can’t believe it’s just coincidence. Possibly came from Sanskrit, there’s a lot of that influence here, especialy in Thai and Khmer, but I don’t really know for a fact.
As a reasonably fluent (but non-native) Indonesian speaker, I’d say that’s Indonesian as opposed to Malay - if I’m not mistaken, terms like “sih” and “sang” are from Javanese and don’t appear in Malaysian writing. Anyway, here is a bad translation of what it says: “Before we enter into the thinking and steps of the community organization any further, it is good that we consider, what exactly is this community organization? What are the philosophy, values and goals of this organization? From what and how is this organization operated, who utilizes it? What is the difference between this organization and other strategies and inventions having the same goal, that is helping poor people and the marginalized?”
What cracks me up on some resumes I’ve seen is when people list “Indonesian” and “Malaysian” on their resumes as two different languages that they speak, like this is going to make them look smarter. You might as well put “American English” and “Australian English” down.
um, “interventions” not inventions, of course.
Heh. I thought it looked like Malay from the mouseover preview! Absolutely not Japanese, not with all those nasty consonants at the ends of words.
I’m not sure about that. This entry on the Ethnolouge says that Indonesian is “[o]ver 80% cognate with Standard Malay.”
Here are the links for the wiki articles on Malay language and Indonesian language, both good reading.
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I’m not sure about that. This entry on the Ethnolouge says that Indonesian is “[o]ver 80% cognate with Standard Malay.”
No really, they ARE the same language. The vocabulary choices vary somewhat (you say cab, I say taxi) but everyone knows what everyone else is saying. You might as well say that British and American English are different because the Brits say “telly,” mean something different by “jumper” than Americans do, and eat “bangers and mash.” I know this from personal experience, because following intensive language training in Indonesian, I lived in Indonesia for 7 years, traveled widely in Malaysia and held plenty of conversations with Malaysians in Indonesian/Malay.
The ironic thing is that, except for Malaysians from one or two remote areas, Westerners who studied “Indonesian” and have practiced their conversational skills almost exclusively in Indonesia still find it easier to understand Malaysians than they do a lot of Indonesians! In Jakarta the everyday language is so slangy and influenced by Chinese and Javanese that, if you learned Indonesian with textbooks and professors, and just use it professionally and at upscale social gatherings, you won’t understand a lot of what the “Man on the Street” is saying. By contrast, Malaysians tend to use more formal, standard Malay/Indonesian with less regional variation, so they are less confusing for foreigners.
Any differences in Malysian and Indonesian stem from the chances of history. The people all used to speak the same tongue. The British colonized Malaysia, the Dutch colonized Indonesia. Over the past few hundred years, any differences that have emerged largely resulted from the two spheres of influence keeping the locals in the respective areas apart from each other.
Getting back to the Sanskrit, this entire area was Hindu as recently as 1000 years ago. Angkor Wat in Cambodia is largely Hindu. As such, holy men from India were common everywhere. For Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, the term “Indo-China” really does reflect the influences that both India and China have had on them over the millenia. Lots of Sanskit gognates in the Khmer language.