Speaking in tongues
Sir: Theodore Dalrymple may have had his tongue in his cheek (or lidah tiada bertulang) when he wrote about Indonesian (If symptoms persist, 23 October), but I suspect not.
It seems clear he did not get very far with his dictionary or manual (which was it?). If he had, he might have discovered that Indonesian does have rather more verb forms than he suspected and grammar needs to be taught quite extensively in Indonesian schools. It is, moreover, very easy to make mistakes in Indonesian, as the many reference works on sale in Jakarta (and his own misspelling) bear witness.
Few foreigners succeed in reading Indonesian literature (or even the Indone- sian tabloid press) in the original. Surely they are not held back by the simplicity of the language?
It is sad to see yet another example of a jokey put-down of a foreign language. However, there is a glimmer of a useful idea in what he says. It is high time that we began to follow the Australians and encouraged our children to learn the lan- guage of a dynamic and rapidly developing south-east Asian state of 200 million plus, with many historical and cultural links with this country (even Dirk Bogarde soldiered there). Sadly, as it stands, his article merely reinforces the all too common view that a language is easy, because a glass of beer and a Big Mac can be ordered fairly painlessly in a' bazaar' or 'kitchen' version of that language. If he had, for instance, tried to translate his article into Indone- sian, Dr Dalrymple might have discovered that it is a rather more complex and deli- cate linguistic instrument than he had bar- gained for. He might like to ponder on the following pepatah (proverb) and its grammaticality: Bahasa menunjukkan bangsa.
Brian D. Smith,
29 Nackington Road, Canterbury, Kent
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