Yes, a typical Malaysian or Singaporean (especially if he has native or near native Malay language skill) will be able to order food at restaurants, buy stuffs, ask for directions, and even converse with an Indonesian speaker, albeit with awkwardness every so often. But for serious or technical discussion, the conversers might as well switch to English for better communication, even if they both only have moderate level of English.
>The word "Bahasa" means "language", and in Indonesian languages always seemed to be prefixed with ""Bahasa", e.g. "bahasa Indonesia", "bahasa Inggris", "bahasa Jerman".
It is probably derived from the Sanskrit word "bhaashaa" (writing it phonetically, if that is the correct term), since Indians had traveled to and culturally influenced parts of S.E. Asia in earlier centuries. Singapore (the name itself is from singha-pura which means lion city), Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, all have a lot of Indian cultural influence, not only in the sense of Buddhism, but words in the language, for people and place names, food ingredient influences and other things.
It's quite interesting, really, for me, as an Indian, because as I read various topics about those regions, which I keep doing now and then, I keep coming across such words and other influences that I can recognize as having something to do with India. Of course, that sort of reading (about any country) is interesting even without such influences existing :)
1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chola_invasion_of_Srivijaya
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia
>The influence could have gone the other way
Can be, sure. My saying that there was influence in one direction did not rule out it happening the other way as well Good point.
>often influences are very indirect, such as Sanskrit's influence on European languages - it wasn't due to lots of Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.
Sure. I did not claim that. In fact, I've read a bit about the common features of Indian and European languages, etc. - and you can detect it too, if you listen to, or read, stuff in both Indian and European languages - e.g. mater (Latin) ~ mata (Sanskrit), pater (Latin) ~ pita (Sanskrit), hundreds more words that seem to sound similar or have a common root which historians say is due to the common Proto-Indo-European roots of both, which is the topic of a descendant (but really ancestor :) link of the one you posted: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-European-languages
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language
and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-Europeans
Not sure how true all of that is, though. I have a healthy skepticism about historians, particularly when they cross-quote each other, and make claims about the past that almost sound like they were present there at the time :) And another reason is how the heck can they know all that they claim to, about things so long ago.
Is that supposed to be an argument against it? Have you examined the arguments and evidence, which thousands of experts have examined and been convinced by? What exactly do you object to?
Which "thousands of experts", are you referring to, exactly?
Sure, there could be many thousands of "expert" historians. My point is, have you personally "examined the arguments and evidence" of those thousands of experts, who you claim have been convinced by said evidence? If not, why are you arguing on their behalf?
>What exactly do you object to?
I'm objecting to the fact that some of them (whose claims I have read in history or Sanskrit courses I studied in school), state things about people and events of centuries ago, as though they know for sure that those things happened in the way they claim - without providing evidence, except for their assertions, which anyone can make.
That's why I have a healthy skepticism about them.
>it wasn't due to lots of Sanskrit speakers vacationing in France.
It may be true or false, but have you examined the evidence for it, if any? If not, how are you saying it categorically, and questioning my doing the same on another point (about historians)?
Who determines that they are experts? You? If so, are you more qualified than them, so that you can determine that they are experts? Where's your evidence for being a better expert than those "thousands of experts"?
I think this confusion arose because it was similarities between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit that first alerted scholars to the existence of a common ancestor.
You can see a family tree of the Indo-European languages at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Grammar
(That's a scholarly article, don't go by it, though you could skim it, just giving it for background info. Try out the language instead.)
There are a handful of rules, and the rest of the stuff builds upon that, the way programs build upon the handful of syntax and semantic rules about statements in programming language.
An interesting point mentioned in the article is that "Word order is free" in Sanskrit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order
While not a linguist myself, I've noticed that the meanings of sentences in Sanskrit seem to be intelligible and mean the same, even if you switch some of the words around. I don't know if that is true for any other languages.
I wonder if that point has any connection with the concept of context-free grammars.
- Our Singaporean host had business dealings in Indonesia and he said he could get by just relying on his Malay language skills, so it seems that Malay and Bahasa Indonesia have a decent degree of mutual intelligibility.
- In one of the national museums we ran into an American professor who had been teaching part time in Indonesia for many years. Among other things, he mentioned that when Indonesia was founded, the government created a standard vocabulary for the language at the same time. He thought that that was one of the smartest things they'd done.
- One Indonesian woman that I spoke with (who I presume was Javanese) mentioned that one of the benefits of Bahasa Indonesia was that the Javanese in one village might not be mutually intelligible (in the practical sense, anyway) with the Javanese spoken in another village a few miles away. But you could always switch to Bahasa Indonesia to communicate.
- The word "Bahasa" means "language", and in Indonesian languages always seemed to be prefixed with ""Bahasa", e.g. "bahasa Indonesia", "bahasa Inggris", "bahasa Jerman". However, I recall several times hearing Indonesians using just the word "bahasa" when clearly referring to the Indonesian language. This was speaking in English though, so it might not be representative of how they'd say it in Indonesian.