Inspired by a blog post on maptia.com, I'm currently doing a personal project called 'Untranslatable Bahasa Indonesia', since so far I can hardly find one on the Internet. I'm collecting Indonesian words that may have no exact equivalents in English (or, perhaps, in another language). The list is not exhaustive, of course, and some words may, upon later research, turn out to be translatable into another language--which is good.
The purpose is manifold:
The purpose is manifold:
- To me, this is to motivate me to browse through Indonesian dictionaries and thesauri.
- To Indonesian speakers, this is to encourage us to discuss the wealth of Bahasa Indonesia beyond oft-repeated spelling and grammatical mistakes (e.g. dimana v di mana, merubah v mengubah, etc.)
- To non-Indonesian speakers, this is to celebrate linguistic diversity and to encourage you to find untranslatable words or expressions in your native languages.
- Help me find more untranslatable Indonesian words
- Help me find the equivalents of these untranslatable Indonesian words
It should be noted that the term 'Bahasa Indonesia' is not exclusive of Malay, which is in most cases mutually intelligible.
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