On 27/11/13 15:01, Philip Taylor wrote:
Jonathan Kew wrote:
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).
Much as I am grateful for your support in this, I do think in fairness
I should point out that (a) the OED goes on to say "Also ellipt.", and
(b) of the 10 citations given, only one uses "Bahasa" in stand-alone
mode rather than as a generic term (meaning [the] [national] language
[of]) followed by a country name. Thus I suspect that UNESCO were
in fact using the word elliptically in the context quoted.
Yes, that's entirely possible, although the OED does define the
"standalone" word. Still, I'm familiar with this use of "bahasa" alone
from plenty of other contexts, too (sorry, I don't have citations on
hand) - though it could reasonably be argued that they're all examples
of elliptical usage.
If such an elliptical usage becomes sufficiently well-established,
however, surely it has the effect of creating a new definition of the
shortened term. I'd suggest that the same thing has happened to the word
"American", for example, via the phrase "American English".
JK
