Agronesia

The Indonesian language has this weird construction of phrases that seem like verb phrases but can actually be noun phrases. For example, the phrase “makan malam” (literally “to night-eat”) looks like a verb phrase, and it is indeed so in the example sentence “Kemarin saya makan malam.” (I ate dinner yesterday). However it can also mean the noun phrase “dinner”, such as in the sentence “Makan malamnya sangat sederhana.” (The dinner was very modest). Using the standard grammar to change a verb to noun, one expects it to be “makanan malam” (night food) which isn’t the case.

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I just did some reading about subordinate clause because I need to write about it for my Indonesian Japanese language learning blog Yumeko. It seems that in English and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) we need relative pronouns such as who, which, and yang:

Nick gave a handful of potato chips to the dog who was sniffing around the picnic tables.

Nick memberi sejumlah keripik kentak ke anjing yang sedang mengendus-endus di sekitar meja-meja piknik.

On the other hand, the subordinate clause in Japanese has the same form as its independent clause:

It means that in Indonesian and English the underlined clause cannot stand on its own as a complete sentence while the one in Japanese can.

On the consistency in the grammatical structure of describing nouns, English isn’t consistent. Look at these three examples of how a simple adjective modifies a noun:

blue book (MODIFIER HEAD)

buku biru (H M)

青い本
aoi hon (M H)

We can see that when subordinate clause is used, the English language switches to use the H M structure.

The last interesting point is that the Indonesian subordinate clause above can directly function as a noun phrase without any modification:

Did I misanalyze?

If you need an Indonesian word list, probably for language processing, a starting point to make your uber dictionary, or others, here it is:

indonesian_word_list.zip (103 KB, 36203 entries)

The data is from the Indonesian dictionary for OpenOffice.org, kindly provided by Benitius Brevoort. I searched for it a long time ago for my program WordFinder which is used to find suitable words for mnemonics. For English words, I could just use the regex in Stardict.

I hope you find it useful.

This shirt contains the Thailand alphabet. I lived in Thailand for around 4 years, but couldn’t read anything at all. What’s interesting is that the Wikipedia articled states that space is generally not used in writing because most words are monosyllabic. Never realized that also.

I sadly couldn’t speak Thai. Well, I probably can speak the two most important expressions for a man: “khong nam ti nai?” (where is the toilet?) and “pom rak kun” (I (male) love you). I’m of course using the never-before-heard Agronesian romanization.

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