Questioning 'The Great Indonesian Dictionary' (KBBI)

摘要

There are several aspects that should be considered in "the Great Indonesian Dictionary" or "Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia" (KBBI) that is related to the ignorance of potential forms of Indonesian language, which actually have capacity to enrich the KBBI. Although KBBI has undergone several improvements in terms of the number of vocabularies, most of the vocabularies are derived from absorption of local or foreign languages basic vocabularies. The effort in increasing the number of vocabularies based on the existing forms might not be considered as a serious concern, observed from the fact that there are numerous potential forms that do not exist in the KBBI, such as mengurang which means to lessen or to reduce, as the opposite of menambah which means to add. Therefore, this paper aims to elaborate the weaknesses of KBBI viewed from the absence of the existing potential forms by relying on the generative morphology approach.