On 27/11/13 14:30, Arthur Reutenauer wrote:
The Universe of Discourse is the names of languages, not the set of
English nouns.
Yes, and "bahasa" is not the name of a language.
Actually, it may be. Yes, it is clearly a Malay word (derived from
Sanskrit or Pali or whatever...) meaning "language", but in English it
can be used by itself as a language name. As the Oxford English
Dictionary defines it:[1]
> Bahasa, n. The variety of Malay used as the national language of the
> Republic of Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia) or of Malaysia (Bahasa
> Malaysia).
While it is most often (and less ambiguously) used in the compounds
"Bahasa Indonesia" and "Bahasa Malay[sia]", it may also be used by
itself, as shown in one of the OED's illustrative quotations:
> 1970 Sruth (Inverness) 16 Apr. 2/1 UNESCO has said this about the
> revival of Irish in Eire: ‘It is clearly silly and a waste of time to
> scold the Irish, for instance, for reviving their ancient tongue, or
> the Indonesians for adopting Bahasa in preference to a European
> language of wide diffusion.’
I suspect that the same hyphenation patterns may well be suitable for
both Indonesian and Malaysian usage; but if there's a distinction in
other aspects of polyglossia's (or babel's) language support, then it's
not obvious which of them 'bahasa' should provide. As such, it may be
better not to support it as a synonym for either. If Babel needs to
support it for backward compatibility reasons, it might be as well to
document it as "deprecated" and recommend the use of 'indonesian' instead.
JK
[1] http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/14666
