I Think I'm Trilingual
What I have learned from reading the Malay Annals
Author’s Note: I’ve been busy the last few days. Actually, I’ve scheduled this to publish for the usual time while I’m in a hotel. Enjoy.
Welcome back!
As I have said in Substack Notes before, I have been reading The Malay Annals, also known as Sejarah Melayu in Malay. What’s that? It’s a narrative history of the Malay people1, particularly the Sultanate of Malacca though the story goes all the way back to Alexander the Great2.
I’m not finished yet3, but it’s a great read. Part of this is the novelty, to be sure; I am generally ignorant of the ancient Malay history so it was fun to discover these stories. Another thing is that this is the first book I’ve read in Malay, and the first I’ve seriously read that’s not in either English nor Indonesian.
This brings me to the title of this blogpost: I think I’m trilingual. I’m pretty sure I understand Malay well. No, scratch that! I know I understand Malay well. To confirm this, I checked out the Malay Wikipedia. And yes, I can understand things there pretty well. Though there are some linguistic differences between Malay and Indonesian that create some unintentional humor:
As an additional bit of experimentation, I also checked out the Javanese Wikipedia4. The result? I don’t really understand it. Sure, I can understand parts of it through logic or some cultural osmosis owing to having lived in Jakarta. However, I also had to deal with stretches of sentences that I did not understand. I’d say I understand Javanese about as well as I understand Spanish5, perhaps even less so.
Of course, language is a fuzzy thing. More so than a lot of us are willing to admit. I touched upon it a little at Substack Notes:
But as it turns out, I may have been wrong this whole time. Wikipedia6 considers Indonesian and Malay to be part of the same language. Personally, I found this to be a bit strange. However, this isn’t a unique situation. Something similar can be seen in the Balkans where Serbians, Croatians, and Bosniaks are all considered to speak a single language, Serbo-Croatian. Do these people, who don’t exactly like each other7, really consider themselves to all be speaking the same language?
Unfortunately, I don’t have friends from that part of the world. So I can neither confirm nor deny.
Perhaps I’m not trilingual after all, though I’d like to think so. I want to tell people that I speak three languages: English, Indonesian, and Malay. Of course, I’ll be hoping that they don’t know how similar to each other the latter two are and call me out on it.
Until next time,
Michael P. Marpaung
Think The Annals of Imperial Rome or The Romance of the Three Kingdoms but Malaysian
Or so they say.
At the moment of this blogpost’s writing, I’m about 87% through. At least according to my Kindle.
Why Javanese? Because it’s probably the language with most native speakers in Indonesia. Yes, even more than Indonesian.
Also through cultural osmosis of having lived in those parts of the US where there are significant Latino population. Not to mention watching soccer with Spanish announcers.
Not that I consider Wikipedia to be a real authority on any matter. But I do think it’s a useful tool.
To put it lightly.
We found it much easier to navigate Malaysia with our Sumatran Indonesian that it was to navigate Jakarta/Java where the Indonesian was so often mixed with Javanese. Huge difference between the roots of Javanese and the Malay-based languages. But, what I want to know is, are you reading the Malay in that old script? Or do you have a transliterated source??? That's a whole 'nother ballgame.