The word Tuhan is the original Indonesian word with the original meaning ‘Lord’ which nowadays is still preserved in the word tuan ‘Sir’. The Arabic…
Posts published by “Prof. Dr. Uli Kozok”
German philologist Uli Kozok was a lecturer at the University of Auckland in 1994-2001 before he became Associate Professor at the Department of Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific Languages and Literature at the University of Hawaii in Manoa.
Kozok, who speaks German, English, Dutch, Indonesian and Batak fluently, obtained his master’s degree in 1989 and his PhD (Magna cum laude) in 1994 from the University of Hamburg. His thesis was on the Batak language.
The Indonesian language has a fairly large number of classifiers to count objects based on their characteristics. Among the many classifiers for items, the most…
The term jamu covers a wide range of traditional herbal tonics and medicines. There are jamu medicines for almost every imaginable complaint: for colds and coughs, aches…
There are many words for “you”: Anda is just one of them and is by no means the most commonly used. In fact Anda is a fairly…
The word ngapain is pronounced /ŋā.PĀ.een/ with an initial sound like the “ng” in the middle of the English word “singing”. It is a very…
The basic sentence in Indonesian is often said to consist of a “topic” (the thing or person that is the beginning point for what you…
Contributed and posted by ‘The Indonesian Way’, a textbook for the Indonesian language by George Quinn and Uli Kozok. “Saya minta” is a very useful…
Unlike in English the word order in bahasa Indonesia is ‘the primary word is placed in the front, followed by the defining word’, whilst in…
Contributed and posted by ‘The Indonesian Way’, a textbook for the Indonesian language by George Quinn and Uli Kozok. The small ceremony of a formal…
For the most part the spelling of Indonesian is regular and fairly faithfully follows the sounds of the language. But there is one letter in Indonesian that represents a different sound from what is usually represented by the same letter in English.
Modesty is an important virtue in Indonesia. Indonesians tend to avoid making blunt negative statements such as Makanan ini tidak enak “I don’t like this food.” It is much better to use 'Makanan ini kurang enak' which literally means “This food is less delicious.”
Contributed and posted by ‘The Indonesian Way’, a textbook for the Indonesian language by George Quinn and Uli Kozok. It is important to bear a…