Finding comprehensive and reliable information about the origins of Indonesian and Malay loan-words has always been difficult. Few Indonesian and Malay general dictionaries, monolingual or bilingual, contain such information. Moreover, most of those that do mark loan-words, including Wilkinson (Reference Wilkinson1959), Karow and Hilgers-Hesse (Reference Karow and Hilgers-Hesse1962), Labrousse (Reference Labrousse1984), and some others, are out of print and difficult to find nowadays outside of scholarly libraries. The only recent bilingual dictionary that is readily available and that contains etymological information is Stevens and Schmidgall-Tellings (Reference Stevens and Schmidgall-Tellings2004). In addition, a series of check-lists of varying quality exists, under the general title of the Indonesian Etymological Project, published irregularly between 1978 and 1997 that covers loan words from Sanskrit (1997), Arabic (and Persian) (1978), Chinese (in press) and European languages (1983). It is very difficult to find copies of the individual volumes in this series. There also exist some monographs, such as Santa Maria (Reference Maria1967) on Portuguese loans, and Kong Yuan Zhi (Reference Zhi1987) on Chinese loans. The etymological information provided in general dictionaries, moreover, is most often limited to just an abbreviation for the source (for example, S for Sanskrit, A for Arabic, etc.) without any further details or discussion.
The book under review is therefore a welcome addition to our knowledge of loan-words in Indonesian and Malay. Based on meticulous scholarship and beautifully produced, this work has in-depth information about loan-words in Indonesian and Malay, contains much more reliable and detailed information about these loan-words, and the information is presented in a way that is easier to access than in any of the works referred to above. Despite certain limitations, to be discussed below, this is a marvellous book. The degree of detail, the historical overview and the coverage are unparalleled and unlikely to be surpassed any time soon.
The editor, however, decided to cover only words borrowed from outside the Malay/Indonesian archipelago and peninsula. The book does not include borrowings into Indonesian from other languages such as Javanese and Sundanese and from other dialects of Malay (such as Ambonese, Manadonese and the dialect of Jakarta) spoken inside the archipelago, some of which have influenced Indonesian for centuries.
The book is very well organised. The first part, a 33-page introduction, lays out a brief history of the project, its objectives and limits, and the general principles behind the book. Next is a detailed discussion of the composition of the entries. This is followed by a brief discussion of the historical contacts that took place between each of the ten donor languages – Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, Hindi, Tamil, Chinese, European languages (Portuguese, Dutch, and English), Japanese, Thai – and Indonesian/Malay. The next section is a five-page select bibliography. This is followed by a map spread across two pages showing where the donor languages are spoken and where Indonesian and Malay are spoken natively.
The body of the book contains a list almost 350 pages long and 20,000 entries of all the loan words from these donors in Indonesian and Malay. Each entry consists of: the headword, an English gloss, further information about the entry, the Chinese character (if the word comes from Chinese), the presumed source language, the form of the loan word in the source language, a reference to where the source word (except for those from Japanese and European languages) can be found in one of the dictionaries in the bibliography, some additional information about the history of the word, and finally variant spellings of the headword.
The book ends with three appendices: rare Chinese characters, a brief history of the Indonesian Etymological Project, and Acknowledgements. Last is a list of symbols and abbreviations. What is more, the book is accompanied by a CD which contains a facsimile edition of an Amoy-English Dictionary (Douglas, Reference Douglas1899), since most of the Chinese loanwords in Indonesian and Malay come from this variety of Chinese, and not from Mandarin.
Given the complexity of its formatting and the words referenced from many languages, it contains amazingly few misprints. I noticed the following ones: (p. 148) kecap ‘soy sauce’ should be kécap, (p. 319) terka ‘guess’ is out of alphabetical order. It should have appeared on p. 320. I am, however, unable to judge the correctness of the Chinese characters.
The work is comprehensive and very well-organised. There are, however, some problems. Some are minor and some are endemic to the nature of loan-words in Indonesian/Malay. One of the minor problems is that some words given as borrowings are almost certainly native words and are not borrowed. For example, hari ‘day’ given on p. 104 as borrowed from Sanskrit and pandai ‘smith’ given on p. 232 as also as borrowed from Sanskrit are undoubtedly native.
Some of the edition's problems, however, are more pervasive and more endemic to the nature of loan-words in Indonesian/Malay. There are many difficulties in assigning the source language of words borrowed into Indonesian and Malay. For example, Professor Jones notes that words identified as coming from Sanskrit may actually have come into Indonesian via Javanese and not directly from Sanskrit. Another puzzle is: How do we know whether a European word, such as ‘amalgam’, comes from Dutch or English? The only way to decide this question would be to know when the word entered Indonesian, and this information is not given in the book and might not even be recoverable. How do we know whether a word comes directly from Arabic or through one of the Persianised Indian languages? Professor Jones does not gloss over these problems. Each of these issues, and others, is discussed in the Introduction to the book.
Another problem is coverage, what to include in the list of borrowings and what to exclude. There are now so many words that have been borrowed from English, how should we limit the list? In addition, there have been more and more Arabic borrowings into Indonesian in recent years. Where should we set the limits?
One example is the words containing prefixes derived from western or Sanskrit prefixes such as anti-, ko-, kon-, hétero-, pasca-, tata- and others as well as suffixes such as -asi and -itas. There are endless numbers of such words and for some of them, such as pasca- and tata-, new ones are being created constantly. Where should an etymological dictionary stop? I could easily have added scores of words to the list of European-derived words that made it into this dictionary.
A particularly telling example is the suffix -itas, now used to form so many neologisms in Indonesian. The basis for the assignment of the source language in this list is obscure to me. Only a brief mention is made of this suffix on p. xxxii of the Introduction. Just to choose some examples at random: béstialitas ‘bestiality’ on p. 27 is said to derive from either Dutch bestialiteit or English bestiality. On the other hand, kréativitas ‘creativity’ on p. 169 is said to come from Dutch creativiteit. But konéksitas on p. 163 is said to derive from konéksi, which is said to come from Dutch (the original Dutch spelling is not given in this article) plus the Latin suffix -itas. On the other hand konéktivitas ‘connectivity’ is not included here even though I find more than 60,000 hits on Google for this word in Indonesian contexts. And finally, universitas ‘university’ on p. 332 is derived from Latin universitas. What is the basis for these decisions and many others? I seem to remember (and I don't know where to find information on this) that in the 1960s or so there were discussions among Indonesian lexicographers about how to treat words ending in -iteit in Dutch and in -ity in English. The solution was to choose the Latinate suffix -itas instead. So since this was a more-or-less arbitrary decision, it might be pointless to try to decide on the etymology in individual cases.
The usefulness of this book goes far beyond the etymological information that it contains. It also brings together in a single volume many obscure or obsolete words known only within certain communities (such as in the Chinese community in Malaysia or among the people in the Minahasa area of North Sulawesi in Indonesia) or words borrowed from Japanese and used during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. This book will prove very useful for someone who comes across an obscure word in either Indonesian or Malay, a word that might not appear in ordinary general bilingual dictionaries. It would otherwise be very difficult to track these words down.
My quibbles with this work do not detract from its importance. This is a beautiful piece of scholarship and one that will serve the community of Indonesian and Malay scholars well for many years to come.
