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JP comment - Let's learn Tetum
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John M Miller
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Jun 15, 2007 05:53 PDT
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Jakarta Post
June 15, 2007
Let's learn Tetum
I'm commenting on an article Timor Leste needs Indonesian language
more than others by Janet Steele and Jerry Macdonald (The Jakarta
Post, June 11).
The fact that Timor Leste's new president, Jose Ramos Horta, has
begun learning Indonesian is not only welcome, it is long overdue --
he should have done this years ago. However, not even he would agree
with Janet Steele and Jerry Macdonald's assertion that Indonesian,
not Tetum, is the country's lingua franca.
One of the most positive developments since 1999 has been the
increased use of Tetum as a written language, and the absence of a
standardized spelling and grammar has proved no barrier at all.
Despite its name, most of the locally written articles in Suara Timor
Lorosae are now in Tetum, not Indonesian.
Unfortunately, some Indonesian-educated people are as just as guilty
of having an inferiority complex about Tetum as Portuguese-educated
ones. Under Soeharto's Indonesia, Tetum in East Timor was just
another bahasa daerah (local dialect), spoken, but not written,
having no more status than it did under Salazar's Portugal.
Tetum is neither a dialect nor a creole, it is a language in its own
right, but just as English and Indonesian have derived much of their
vocabulary from other languages, so too has Tetum.
Many Portuguese-derived words in Tetum are similar to those used in
English or Indonesian, because they share the same Latin roots. For
example, konstituisaun (from constituigco) is similar to
"constitution". Some purists use the term ukun fuan inan, but this is
no different from Indonesians using undang-undang dasar instead of
konstitusi. However, few languages are pure, while a pure lingua
franca is an oxymoron, be it Swahili in East Africa or Indonesian in
Southeast Asia.
Yet despite the European influences, Tetum remains a
Malayo-Polynesian language, with many words, such as bua, besi,
tahan, sala and matan shared with Indonesian, although words like
mane (man), feto (woman), foho (mountain), lia (voice) and fuan
(fruit) are not. The Tetum for "word" is liafuan, literally "voice fruit".
Given that Tetum shares so many words with these other languages, and
is not grammatically complex, would it really be a challenge for
outsiders living in Timor Leste, be they Indonesians, Australians or
Portuguese, to make the effort to learn it?
The argument that Tetum is "undeveloped" or "not yet developed"
should be dispelled once and for all. If it is adequate for newspaper
articles and discussion forums, it is perfectly adequate for public
signs and official documents. NGOs like the women's network Rede Feto
have called for legal documents to be written in Tetum since it (not
Indonesian or Portuguese) "is the preferred language of the people".
Mai ita hotu aprende Tetun (let's all learn Tetum).
KEN WESTMORELAND
Jakarta
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John M. Miller Internet: fb-@igc.org
National Coordinator
East Timor & Indonesia Action Network (ETAN)
PO Box 21873, Brooklyn, NY 11202-1873 USA
Phone: (718)596-7668 Fax: (718)222-4097
Mobile phone: (917)690-4391 Skype: john.m.miller
Web site: http://www.etan.org
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