So I Gave My Blog A Name
Ever since putting up my first language post/article/essay/listicle two weeks ago, I’ve been trying to come up with a name for my “publication” here on Medium.
Some rejected ideas include:
- Kevin’s Language Blog
- The Language Blog
- Thoughts on Language, Language Musings, Linguistic Meditations, etc.
- The Polyglot Blog
- Polyblog
- some pun involving multiple languages and the word “blog,” e.g. riffing on it’s similarity to French blague, Russian blago, Persian balāg̠at, etc.
- dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s (holy crap) — the Indo-European root for tongue/language, whose descendants include tongue, lingua, zabān and somehow jazyk
As you can see I went a bit off the deep end in my brainstorming, but none of these really captured what I thought my blog should be about.
In the end, I went with a simple solution — I invented a fake Sanskritic Malay word, Bahasantara, to use as the name of the blog. (The home page is here.)
….
Okay, maybe not that simple. But I think it works. I’ll explain.
So, what the heck is "Bahasantara"?
One of the recurring themes in my language-learning process has always been an obsession with the interconnections between languages and how those relationships have been influenced by history and geography. I previously wrote about how Russian was often my point of departure for exploring languages all across the Eurasian landmass, but more recently I stumbled upon another geographic language-learning route — I somehow managed to absentmindedly drift all the way from Ireland across the “inner crescent” to Japan over the course of a year, moving from country to neighboring country, dabbling in or revisiting various languages along the way.
(Specifically, it was something like Irish->Scots->Breton->French->Old French->Occitan->Catalan->Italian->Romanian->Albanian->Turkish->Ottoman Turkish->Kurdish->Armenian->Hebrew->Amharic->Arabic->Persian->Urdu->Hindi->Bengali->Indonesian->Thai->Wu Chinese->Japanese, plus a few detours for Uzbek, Uyghur, Telugu, etc.)
Thinking about language-learning in these geographical terms for some reason reminded me of (get ready for the big non-sequitur) the Indonesian political concept of “Nusantara,” which nowadays refers to the Indonesian archipelago and derives from the Javanese/Malay word nusa (“island”) and Sanskrit antara (“between” or “other” — related to the prefix “inter-” as well as the word “under”).
Also, the Indonesian/Malay word for “language” is bahasa, which comes from Sanskrit भाषा/bhāṣā, which is also found in Thai (ภาษา/paa-sǎa), Khmer (ភាសា/pʰiesaa), Burmese (ဘာသာ/batha), and obviously most Indian languages. (It’s related to the English word “fate” too. 🤔)
So what if I replaced nusa in Nusantara with bahasa? Wouldn’t Bahasantara be an something like an archipelago of languages? That's pretty much the mental image I was looking for — all the languages I’ve studied have been like parts of one huge island chain, a network of interlocking clusters stretching across the entire world.
(Note 1: Nusantara has a narrow, specific meaning in Indonesian and is not the word for “archipelago” in general. That would be kepulauan, which uses the more common word for “island” — pulau.)
(Note 2: You can’t spell “language” without “gulag.” I haven’t had time to turn this into a full-fledged “Gulag Archipelago” pun so I’m just leaving this observation here.)
Next, I just needed to make sure this word I made up wasn’t already being used for something else.
If you google “Bahasantara,” you get about 2,000 hits. Most of the results are Indonesian academic articles that use “bahasantara” as a translation for “interlanguage,” a technical term that refers to the form of a language that second-language learners speak before they become fully fluent. To be quite honest about my proficiency, many (most?) of the languages I speak are really interlanguages, so this other (apparently rare) connotation is just fine.
I also doubled-checked what would have been the original Sanskrit form of this word, if it was real: भाषान्तर/bhāṣāntara. This can apparently mean either “another language” or more commonly “translation.” (It’s not the most frequently used word for “translation,” though, which would be अनुवाद/anuvāda.) I have no problem with these extra connotations either.
Meaning aside, I think the word Bahasantara also has a pretty good look-and-feel about it. All the vowels are “a”, the most basic vowel ever, while the consonants are nice and varied but also common among world languages. Bahasa and antara are both six letters and have an overlapping a in the middle, so there’s a cool bit of symmetry going on here as well. The sounds here also vaguely remind me of the movie titles Baraka and Samsara, for what it’s worth.
And if you don’t think that this is an absolutely great name for a language blog, well, who really pays that much attention to blog names anyway?
Addendum: Quick Shout-Out to Malay/Indonesian and Javanese!
Like Wu Chinese, Indonesian/Malay and Javanese just barely missed the cut for my first article on the world’s top ten native languages. But now that I’m using a (made-up) Indonesian word as the name of my blog, and a logo that incorporates Javanese script, I guess I’ll make up for that oversight right now….
Recently a friend of mine asked me for help deciding which language he should learn next. He already knew English, Chinese, and most of the commonly-studied western European languages, and was looking for something new which was 1) spoken by lots of people, 2) not grammatically complex (so no Russian or Arabic), and 3) spoken in countries that are fun to visit.
After some back-and-forth, we settled on Indonesian. And really, why not Indonesian? It’s the official language of the world’s fourth most populous country. It has no conjugation, declension, or grammatical gender. It’s written in the same alphabet as English, and is easy to pronounce. It’s 90% the same as the Malay spoken in Malaysia, Brunei, and Singapore, and Indonesia itself — from Sumatra and Java to Bali and Sulawesi — is a hyper-diverse country. Maybe you should think about learning Indonesian, too.
Indonesian has a huge online presence as well — for example, Jakarta was named the world’s most active Twitter city a few years ago, and last year Indonesia was tied with Mexico for first place in active Twitter users worldwide. Almost all popular mobile apps are fully localized into Indonesian, which is great for me since that’s been my phone’s language for the past six months.
Another cool thing about Indonesian is the wide range of foreign influences it’s absorbed over the years. On top of native Austronesian words and really old words it got from Sanskrit (like bahasa and antara, among others), Indonesian also got a whole bunch of Arabic and Persian words during Islamization, Portuguese and Dutch words under colonialism, and even a smattering of Chinese dialect words from the Chinese diaspora there (the colloquial Jakartan pronouns gue and lu, meaning “me” and “you,” are from Hokkien!).
As a major regional trade language, Malay/Indonesian has also influenced many of its neighbors — Papuan New Guinea Pidgin (a.k.a. Tok Pisin) and some northern Australian Aboriginal languages have Malay words in them too. For example the Yolngu word for “white person” is balanda, which comes from Malay belanda, which comes from Holanda i.e. the Netherlands.
Javanese is also a very interesting language (that I’ve only dabbled in briefly), but this post is already getting a bit long and off-topic, so I’ll save my geekery on that subject for another day (when I write about Suriname, probably). Stay tuned.
