11 ms·

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spen

by duffyjp 10mo ago

I was there ~20 years ago. I had made friends with some Indonesia students in college and joined them on a trip home. We were mostly in Surabaya, but did spend some time in Jakarta as well. We had a great time. The language is a hidden gem, you can learn enough to get around on the flight over which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know. Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach.

mmooss 10mo ago
How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?
- itake 10mo ago
  Same as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.
  - rafram 10mo ago
    Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
    - LAC-Tech 10mo ago
      How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
      - alephnerd 10mo ago
        Like this - https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
      - wisty 10mo ago
        Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
      - realusername 10mo ago
        > How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
        seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.
        realusername 10mo ago
        That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that. The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
        seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
    - eaksa 10mo ago
      Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
      - faizmokh 10mo ago
        Jawi is also not popular nowadays among the malaysian malays. Every now and then it will pop up in the news due to politicians using it as a tool to cause racial divide.
    - mc32 10mo ago
      Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
      - dboreham 10mo ago
        Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
  - alephnerd 10mo ago
    > No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese. The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage. A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
    - xvedejas 10mo ago
      Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  One word: Colonization
  - csomar 10mo ago
    Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
    - boxed 10mo ago
      > Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization Is that just because you define "colonization" as "by western countries"?
      - defrost 10mo ago
        Do you have evidence that Malaysia was "colonized" by Arabs? There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate
        hearsathought 10mo ago
        > There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate. Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
        10mo ago
- csomar 10mo ago
  The same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
- hearsathought 10mo ago
  The dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.
asmosoinio 10mo ago
> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know. Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.
- Squealer2642 10mo ago
  Both are Austronesian languages
- duffyjp 10mo ago
  I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears... I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
  - throwaway2037 10mo ago
    In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame. Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
    - Muromec 10mo ago
      >How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.
celloductor 10mo ago
most SEA languages are similar btw
Loughla 10mo ago
>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach. I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though. I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.
- RankingMember 10mo ago
  It'd be nice if there was some way to "acclimate" your gut prior to a trip like that.
ipince 10mo ago
> which I can't say about any other SEA language maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though

by duffyjp 10mo ago

mmooss 10mo ago

How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?

itake 10mo ago
Same as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.
- rafram 10mo ago
  Sort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
  - LAC-Tech 10mo ago
    How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
    - alephnerd 10mo ago
      Like this - https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
    - wisty 10mo ago
      Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
    - realusername 10mo ago
      > How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
      - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.
        realusername 10mo ago
        That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that. The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
        seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - eaksa 10mo ago
    Despite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
    - faizmokh 10mo ago
      Jawi is also not popular nowadays among the malaysian malays. Every now and then it will pop up in the news due to politicians using it as a tool to cause racial divide.
  - mc32 10mo ago
    Vietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
    - dboreham 10mo ago
      Btw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
- alephnerd 10mo ago
  > No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese. The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage. A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
  - xvedejas 10mo ago
    Another factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
throwaway2037 10mo ago
One word: Colonization
- csomar 10mo ago
  Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
  - boxed 10mo ago
    > Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization Is that just because you define "colonization" as "by western countries"?
    - defrost 10mo ago
      Do you have evidence that Malaysia was "colonized" by Arabs? There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate
      - hearsathought 10mo ago
        > There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate. Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
        10mo ago
csomar 10mo ago
The same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
hearsathought 10mo ago
The dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.

asmosoinio 10mo ago

> ...which I can't say about any other SEA language. Phonetic spellings, Latin alphabet, no tonal sounds, dead easy grammar and a million loan words you already know. Nitpick: Sounds a lot like Tagalog (Filipino), another SEA language.

Squealer2642 10mo ago
Both are Austronesian languages
duffyjp 10mo ago
I've never studied it, but my understanding is that like Japanese, Tagalog has the pitched/stressed thing going on. My wife is Japanese and holy cow I can't tell the difference. Bridge or Chopstick? No idea, they sound exactly the same to my ears... I'm pretty fluent, but my pronunciation was as good as it's gonna get like 10 years ago which is a frustration.
- throwaway2037 10mo ago
  In Japan/ese, the pitch/stress thing is overrated, and so are regional language differences. When natives point it out to me, it strikes me a little more than cultural gatekeeping. Linguistic context matters much more. How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar (like 'hashi' in Japanese for bridge/chopsticks)? Almost never. Advice: Ignore it when natives that criticise your pronunciation. Ask them how is their German or Thai is... and they will freeze with shame. Where I come from, to criticise a non-native speakers accent or small grammatical errors (that do not impact the meaning) is a not-so-subtle form of discrimination. As a result, I never do it. (To criticise myself, it tooks many, many years to see this about my home culture and stop doing it myself.) Still, many people ask me: "Hey, can you correct my <language X> when I speak it?" "Sure!" (but I never do.)
  - Muromec 10mo ago
    >How often are you listening to your own native language and you are confused by two words that sounds similar It confuses the hell out of me when non-natives misplace stress in Ukrainian and use wrong cases. It's that I want to gatekeep, but above certain rate of mistakes it's just difficult to follow what is being said.

celloductor 10mo ago

most SEA languages are similar btw

Loughla 10mo ago

>Jakarta is definitely for the adventurous though, and you had better have an iron stomach. I love, love, loved backpacking across quite a bit of southeast Asia. I did not like the massive gastrointestinal problems nearly the entire time though. I spent big money on four things for that trip: the flight, shoes, backpack, and toilet paper. I would've killed and eaten someone to get my hands in alcohol free wet wipes.

RankingMember 10mo ago
It'd be nice if there was some way to "acclimate" your gut prior to a trip like that.

ipince 10mo ago

> which I can't say about any other SEA language maybe this doesn't qualify as "south east asian", but Korean is very easy to learn how to read too. It's not latin alphabet, but you only need to learn 20 symbols, and then everything is phonetic! you can have a lot of fun "reading" all the signs after you study a bit on the plane. Not as many loan words though