Post Rojak

It seems apropos that I completed Lesson 23  of the online Malay course before a potluck. The twenty-third section seems a bit late to introduce such an important part of Malay culture, but the vocabulary is rich. At the nadir of my Bahasa Malaysia knowldedge, all I could say was "Saya hendak beli ikan" ("I would like to buy a fish"). The example sentence introduce the words for husband and wife - suami and isteri, respectively. These words look more Indian than Austronesian to my linguistic eye, although no doubt other words for such a basic relationship exist. The word for cheese, keju, is manifestly Portuguese, and the author of the lesson provides a warning against the consumption of pork in the company of Muslims. Rojak, a medley of individual foods, recieves mention, as does its linguistic equivalent, Bahasa Rojak, the bastard child of linguistic crossroads. The insertion of linguistic terminology relates to something further down the page. The list of fruits (buah-buahan) is extensive - many fruits seem to have no parallel name in English. Among these fruits is durian, the delicious and fragrant fruit. Imagine the smell of growing up in an durian orchard! The section on meal names discriminates between dinner (makan malam) and supper (makan lewat malam), something which Americans often fail to do.

For a linguistic desert, my old love clusivity recieves a clear explanation. Kami is inclusive we (I plus you) and kita is exclusive we (I, but not you). The lack of this distinction in the Indo-European languages is rarer than its presence, but I have read somewhere that the two forms of 'we/us' in Proto-Indo-European is relic of clusivity. You might call the forms relic-clusives! In Bahasa Rojak, however, the inclusive form kami is replaced by the specifically Bahasa Rojak form kitorang, from kita orang, 'we people'. If my hunch is correct, this is a reflection of the use of inclusive forms to reinforce ethnocentric bonds, since my Quechua-speaking ordained acquaintance used a similar example to illustrate clusivity in his mother tongue.