Last updated on January 1, 2019
Contributed and posted by ‘The Indonesian Way’, a textbook for the Indonesian language by George Quinn and Uli Kozok.
Base forms are words that have affixes attached to them. Affixes are like pilot fish, they can’t swim about independently in the great ocean of language, but have to fasten themselves to the shark-like hulks of passing base forms.
Some affixes work at the nose end (like ber- and meN-) and some only at the tail (like -an). Others always operate as a team – two inseparable affixes, one swimming at the nose and the other riding shotgun at the rear, like the per- -an team in the word perpustakaan. There are even a few mysterious affixes that generations ago wormed their way into the gut of certain base words and now, like parasites, have a permanent home there. If you cut into these base words you can locate the affixes, like -el- in telunjuk (index finger) and -in- in kinerja (performance, track record).
Derived forms are those that consist of a base word plus one or more affixes. As we have seen in the case of memperbaiki, some base words may themselves have affixes in them. For example, the derived form berhasil (successful, to succeed) consists of the base word hasil and the prefix ber-. But berhasil can itself be a base word. With the affixes ke- and -an attached to it, it produces the word keberhasilan (success). You should also bear in mind that in certain circumstances most base words can also stand alone without affixes. For example, in certain contexts hasil can stand alone (it means “result”, “outcome”).
It is important to be aware of the distinction between base forms and derived forms, because most Indonesian dictionaries organise their head words, or main entries, according to the alphabetical order of the first letter in base forms, not derived forms. So in most dictionaries you won’t find the word berjalan by looking for it under “b”. You will have to identify the first letter of its base form and look for it under that letter. With a word like berjalan there’s no great problem. With words like melihat, merusak, and even membaca, mencuci, menggoreng and many more, there’s also no huge problem. The base word is clear. You simply go to the base word entry in the dictionary, and under that entry you will find all the various derivatives that can be formed by attaching affixes to the base word concerned.
But suppose you want to look up a word in which the prefix has assimilated or “fused” with the base form causing a change in the initial sound of the base form so that it is no longer instantly recognisable? In such cases we have to use the rules to do a bit of quick detective work. Even then we may be left with two or more possible base words, so we would have to check out each possibility until we find the right base word.
For example, supposing we want to know the meaning of the word memukul.The base word is either mukul or pukul. So we check under “m” to see if there is a base word mukul. There isn’t. So we check under “p” for pukul. Aha! There it is.
In some instances we might have to check up to three possible base words. Take for example the word mengarang. Referring to the rules for the formation of derivatives we can work out that there are three possible base words that mengarang might be formed from: ngarang, arang and karang. We would have to check each of these in the dictionary. In this case we would find that ngarang doesn’t exist. We would find that arang does exist but it doesn’t have a derivative mengarang. So we would be left with karang. Under the head word karang we would find a number of derivatives listed, like karangan, pengarang and mengarang.
Each of dictionaries has a unique approach to description of the Indonesian lexicon. Let’s look at some examples of dictionaries. A Comprehensive Indonesian-English Dictionary by Alan Stevens and Ed Schmidgall- Tellings (2004) has a finely discriminated list of definitions – i.e. possible English translations – for membawa. It illustrates these with a few short sentences and phrases that show how membawa is used in context. It also has information on colloquial variations of membawa, plus many idiomatic expressions containing membawa. And Smith and Schmidgall-Tellings’ goes in one direction only: Indonesian-to-English.
Compare this with the entry for membawa in An Indonesian-English Dictionary by John Echols and Hassan Shadily (3rd revised edition, 1989). Echols and Shadily is dense with information, providing several related idiomatic phrases under each main definition of membawa. Echols and Shadily have also English-to- Indonesian sides to their dictionaries in a separate volume.
An exception to this “normal” way of organising the entries in dictionaries is George Quinn’s The Learner’s Dictionary of Today’s Indonesian (2001). Quinn’s dictionary organises all main entries according to the first letter of each word, irrespective of whether that word is a base word or a word beginning with a prefix.
Quinn’s dictionary has fewer definitions and no idiomatic phrases at all, but it has longer illustratory sentences as well as some information on pronunciation and grammar. It has also English-to- Indonesian side.
Smith and Schmidgall-Tellings, and Echols and Shadily attempt to be comprehensive, covering as much of the Indonesian lexicon as they can, whereas Quinn’s is a “special purpose” dictionary concentrating on a quite limited corpus of highly frequent Indonesian and English words. Quinn’s has a section in which the dictionary’s main entries are sorted into topic groups, and notes on aspects of Indonesian culture are scattered through the dictionary.
All three dictionaries have interesting introductions. Quinn offers a short history of the evolution of the Indonesian language and an overview of its functions in modern Indonesia. Echols and Shadily have a detailed description of the sound system (phonology) of Indonesian, and Smith and Schmidgall- Tellings focus on how to find the base word (they call it the “root”) of derivatives.
Finally, let’s look at the entry for membawa in Indonesia’s semi-official Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (3rd edition, 2005) published by the nation’s Pusat Bahasa (Language Centre), an organ of the Departemen Pendidikan Nasional (Department of National Education). You can consult an online version of this dictionary at by clicking here.
Even if you don’t understand everything in the Kamus Besar you will quickly see that the three Indonesian-English dictionaries we have looked at are indebted in some degree to the Kamus Besar.
As foreign learners of Indonesian you probably have little choice but to start out with an Indonesian-English dictionary (and an English-Indonesian dictionary too, of course). But languages are self-referential, their words construct meaning only by reference to other words in the same language. So as soon as you can, you should let go of bi-lingual dictionaries and graduate to a good Indonesian-Indonesian dictionary.