The Sad Story of the Evolution of Bahasa Indonesia

So I've been studying like mad for the last week for my final exam last Friday and it has put me in a contemplative mood about the evolution of Bahasa Indonesia. Honestly, I think it is a bit of a fucked-up language. This is how I imagine it evolved:

Prehistory - 1700 AD:

Homo-Erectus arrives in Indonesia and he starts to realise that that using the same grunt to say "I killed a fucking water buffalo today! Ho say liao ah! Let's celebrate!" and "Cheebye run ah!!! The fucking volcano is gonna blow!" is hardly an adequate form of communication. He starts to invent language and starts out really ambitious. Bahasa Indonesia will be the pinnacle of communication, more beautiful than French, more complex than Japanese. Even when two Indonesians quarrel, people listening will weep at the poetry that is Bahasa Indonesia.

With this lofty ideal, Homosaswono decides that this perfect language should have different ways of calling yourself and other people depending on social status. So he decides that for formal situations and people you respect, you should use Saya to refer to yourself and Anda to refer to the other person. Then among friends or people who are your subordinates, you should use Aku for "I" or "me" and Kamu for "you" or "your". Saswono also decides that there should be a special class of words for soap operas and cool people where Lu means "you" and Gwe means "me". So far so good. Specific salutations for specific people. It is also during this period where fire and corruption are invented in Indonesia.

1700 - 1945AD: Functional Development of Bahasa Indonesia

Somewhere along the way, someone decided that enough was enough. Inventing specific words for each social class (superior, inferior and soap opera/cool people) was too difficult. Indonesians decide to focus on the functional aspect of the language. Indonesian will be a working language and because of its narrow focus on functional terms, it will inspire people to work harder since it is the only thing they can talk about. Tragically, at this time, Indonesia is a maritime/fishing-based civilisation. So a lot of the conversation goes like "I catch fish which is yellow and red yesterday and after my mother-in-law eat, she have many pain and die. Ha. Ha." Or things like "why my fishing boat have brown shit on it? Eh Sutrisno, you sit close to brown shit. Help me make brown shit go away from boat. Just use (left) hand and flick inside sea can already..." And so on and so forth.

Not much development in the richness of the language but at least they have words for all the colours.

1945AD - Present Day: Bahasa Indonesia Becomes Fucked Up

Now Indonesians get lazy. They invent nonsense words by adding suffixes to almost every fucking phrase so that they can replace whole sentences with a single word. So "menomorsatukan" is a valid word which is actually the phrase "nomor satu" or "number one" together with the suffix "me-kan". "Menomorsatukan" is therefore literally translated as "numberone-ed (as in past tense)" which means "make (something) as the number one priority". For example, "dia suka menomorsatukan pekerjaan" means "he likes to numberone his work" as opposed to "he likes to make his work his number one priority" which would of course take up too much time to say and therefore reduce Indonesian efficiency.

That's not so bad. They also add suffixes to acronyms. Like "di-PHK" means "di-putus-hubungan-kerja". In English, it means "breakworkrelationship-ed" or "fired". Oh sure they have a word for fired but then it isn't too polite to say that so-and-so's been "fired". Much better to say that he's been PHK-ed. Reminds you of when your parents wanted to talk about things in front of you which you weren't supposed to hear when you were a kid right? Like when they spelled out certain words? Like maybe your dad would say to your mum "hey, after dinner you wanna give me a Bee Ell Oh Double-U Jay Oh Bee?" Right? Right? Reminds you of that right?

And then the ones that take the cake are "menCDkan", "menvideokan" and "mendigitalrecordingkan". These are actually valid Indonesian words to be used in everyday life. Because Indonesians are too lazy to say "converted (a lecture for instance) into a CD", they'd rather just say "menCDkan" which is like saying "CD-ed". So if I say "saya menCDkan seminar itu", it means "I CD-ed that seminar". Ridiculous. When my teacher first taught me this word, I figured that it was like a local slang but he said its actually a valid Indonesian word. So I joked that very soon they would be saying "menDVDkan" or "menpodcastkan".

He told me they already had words like that.