If symptoms
persist. . .
I WENT to Indonesia recently — even servants of humanity need a break from their labours sometimes — and while there made some slight attempt to learn Indonesian. In this I was aided by a small and somewhat peculiar dictionary given me by a missionary, which contained the Indonesian equivalents of poisoned bait and propagation by cuttings, but not, alas, those for please and thank you.
Some vocabulary was easy to learn, however, because of its derivation from European languages. Book, for example, is buku, and glass is gelas. Office is kan- tor, from the Dutch. Church is gereja, butter mentega and shoe sepatu from the Portuguese.
There were other etymological con- nections which interested me. The word in Indonesian for fish, for example, is ikan, the same as in some Micronesian languages. The inhabitants of the Pacific atolls are thought to have migrated sev- eral hundred years ago from the Malayan archipelago, which proves that Captain Cook was not such hot potatoes after all, and that our children should be taught the epic journey of the islanders first from the Olduvai Gorge to Malaya, and thence to the desert islands, rather than about his ethnocentric voyages. Indonesian seems to possess a simple and flexible grammar. Much is implied rather than said. There are no articles, definite or indefinite, and plurals are formed merely by repetition: books, for example, is buku-buku. There is no dif- ference between personal and possessive pronouns, there are no tenses and very few verb forms. The orthography of Indonesian is entirely phonetic, and there are no sounds which are difficult for an English tongue to master.
I mention all this because, as I tried to learn Indonesian, my mind returned to a burglar whom I had seen in prison short- ly before I left for the East. It had been suspected that the man was of low intel- ligence — he kept on being caught, after all — and the prison psychologist had been asked to measure his IQ. The psy- chologist's report was most interesting, not so much for what it said about the burglar, but because of what it implied about Britain.
The report confirmed that the man was of lowish intelligence, with an IQ somewhere between 70 and 80. 'He has a reading age of nine years,' continued the report. Then came the really telling com- ment: 'This should enable him to read the tabloid press with ease.'
In other words, between a third and a half of the British population is content to read what an average nine-year-old should be able to read without difficulty.
As I pondered this curious fact, and studied my manual of Indonesian, every- thing suddenly became clear to me: English is too difficult a language for the British to master. In the circumstances, I therefore make a modest proposal: that henceforth the official language of these islands be Indonesian. This would have several advantages, not the least of which is that it would lay to rest once and for all the dispute between those educationists who believe in the necessi- ty of teaching grammar and those who think of grammar itself as bourgeois linguistic imperialism: for it is almost impossible to make a grammatical mistake in Indonesian. Salamat pagi!
Theodore Dalrymple
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