Loan-Words in Indonesian and Malay

摘要

Finding comprehensive and reliable information about the origins of Indonesian and Malay loan-words has always been difficult. Few Indonesian and Malay general dictionaries, monolingual or bilingual, contain such information. Moreover, most of those that do mark loan-words, including Wilkinson (1959), Karow and Hilgers-Hesse (1962), Labrousse (1984), and some others, are out of print and difficult to find nowadays outside of scholarly libraries. The only recent bilingual dictionary that is readily available and that contains etymological information is Stevens and Schmidgall-Tellings (2004). In addition, a series of check-lists of varying quality exists, under the general title of the Indonesian Etymological Project, published irregularly between 1978 and 1997 that covers loan words from Sanskrit (1997), Arabic (and Persian) (1978), Chinese (in press) and Europeanjanguages (1983). It is very difficult to find copies of the individual volumes in this series. There also exist some monographs, such as Santa Maria (1967) on Portuguese loans, and Kong Yuan Zhi (1987) on Chinese loans. The etymological information provided in general dictionaries, moreover, is most often limited to just an abbreviation for the source (for example, S for Sanskrit, A for Arabic, etc.) without any further details or discussion.