BINAR _ Bahasa Indonesia Yang baik Dan Benar

Ini saya menanggapi berita via email mengenai bahasa pada hari ini 30 April, 2010, sayang photo-photonya tidak bisa saya tampilkan.

From: ……. @gmail.com>
Date: Apr 30, 2010 4:35 AM
Subject: Saving the world's languages
To: @yahoogroups.com, 

r@googlegroups.com

Kawan-kawan,

Heran ada orang yang meluangkan waktu mencari melestarikan bahasa yang hampir punah. Dr. Daniel Kaufman jauh jauh dari New York pergi ke Sulawesi Barat mencari pembicara bahasa Mamuju (bahasa apa ini?) entah mengapa tanpa hasil.

Secara kebetulan Daniel Kaufman dalam sebuah acara pernikahan bertemu dengan orang asal Sulawesi bernama Husni Husein (lihat gambar dia berpeci). Tak lama kemudian Daniel Kaufman mendatangi rumah Husni Husein di Queens Borough New York. Pak Husni diminta mengucapkan kalimat kalimat bahasa Inggris dalam Bahasa Mamuju. Yang dicari adalah semua vowels dan consonants sampai keluar semua dan direkam. Tidak semua phones mempunyai arti, maka dicarilah yang membedakan arti yaitu phoneme. Sudah itu dicari pola susunan kata atau syntax dalam Bahasa Mamuju. Tujuan terakhir adalah menyusun aturan bahasa atau grammar bahasa Mamuju.

Metode yang digunakan adalah 'transformational linguistics' yang dicetuskan pertama kali oleh

Noam Chomsky dari Massachusetts Institute of Technology. TL bertolak dari postulat bahwa setiap anak memiliki kemampuan bawaan untuk memahami aturan bahasa apapun. Nah, dari ucapan ('la parole') dicarilah makna ('la langue) yang pertama kali dikemukakan oleh De Saussure. TL marak di seluruh dunia menggeser aliran positifisme. Usaha penerjemahan online seperti Babelfish Altavista dan Google Translate menggunakan TL.

R

  

Listening to (and Saving) the World’s Languages

James Estrin/The New York Times

Valnea Smilovic, 59, left, with her mother, 92, in Queens. They still speak Vlashki, a language spoken by the Istrians.

By SAM ROBERTS

Published: April 28, 2010

 The chances of overhearing a conversation in Vlashki, a variant of Istro-Romanian, are greater in Queens than in the remote mountain villages in Croatia that immigrants now living in New York left years ago.

James Estrin/The New York Times

Husni Husain, 67, says he doesn’t know of any other person in New York who speaks Mamuju, an Austronesian language.

At a Roman Catholic Church in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, Mass is said once a month inGarifuna, an Arawakan language that originated with descendants of African slaves shipwrecked near St. Vincent in the Caribbean and later exiled to Central America. Today, Garifuna is virtually as common in the Bronx and in Brooklyn as in Honduras and Belize.

And Rego Park, Queens, is home to Husni Husain, who, as far he knows, is the only person in New York who speaks Mamuju, the Austronesian language he learned growing up in the Indonesian province of West Sulawesi. Mr. Husain, 67, has nobody to talk to, not even his wife or children.

“My wife is from Java, and my children were born in Jakarta — they don’t associate with the Mamuju,” he said. “I don’t read books in Mamuju. They don’t publish any. I only speak Mamuju when I go back or when I talk to my brother on the telephone.”

These are not just some of the languages that make New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world. They are part of a remarkable trove of endangered tongues that have taken root in New York — languages born in every corner of the globe and now more commonly heard in various corners of New York than anywhere else.

While there is no precise count, some experts believe New York is home to as many as 800 languages — far more than the 176 spoken by students in the city’s public schools or the 138 that residents of Queens, New York’s most diverse borough, listed on their 2000 census forms.

“It is the capital of language density in the world,” said Daniel Kaufman, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “We’re sitting in an endangerment hot spot where we are surrounded by languages that are not going to be around even in 20 or 30 years.”

In an effort to keep those voices alive, Professor Kaufman has helped start a project, the Endangered Language Alliance, to identify and record dying languages, many of which have no written alphabet, and encourage native speakers to teach them to compatriots.

“It’s hard to use a word like preserve with a language,” said Robert Holman, who teaches at Columbia and New York Universities and is working with Professor Kaufman on the alliance. “It’s not like putting jelly in a jar. A language is used. Language is consciousness. Everybody wants to speak English, but those lullabies that allow you to go to sleep at night and dream — that’s what we’re talking about.”

With national languages and English encroaching on the linguistic isolation of remote islands and villages, New York has become a Babel in reverse — a magnet for immigrants and their languages.

New York is such a rich laboratory for languages on the decline that the City University Graduate Center is organizing an endangered-languages program. “The quickening pace of language endangerment and extinction is viewed by many linguists as a direct consequence of globalization,” said Juliette Blevins, a distinguished linguist hired by City University to start the program.

In addition to dozens of Native American languages, vulnerable foreign languages that researchers say are spoken in New York include Aramaic, Chaldic and Mandaic from the Semitic family; Bukhari (a Bukharian Jewish language, which has more speakers in Queens than in Uzbekistan or Tajikistan); Chamorro (from the Mariana Islands); Irish Gaelic; Kashubian (from Poland); indigenous Mexican languages; Pennsylvania Dutch; Rhaeto-Romanic (spoken in Switzerland); Romany (from the Balkans); and Yiddish.

Researchers plan to canvass a tiny Afghan neighborhood in Flushing, Queens, for Ormuri, which is believed to be spoken by a small number of people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The Endangered Language Alliance will apply field techniques usually employed in exotic and remote foreign locales as it starts its research in the city’s vibrant ethnic enclaves.

“Nobody had gone from area to area looking for endangered languages in New York City spoken by immigrant populations,” Professor Kaufman said.

The United Nations keeps an atlas of languages facing extinction, and U.N. experts as well as linguists generally agree that a language will probably disappear in a generation or two when the population of native speakers is both too small and in decline. Language attrition has also been hastened by war, ethnic cleansing and compulsory schooling in a national tongue.

Over the decades in the secluded northeastern Istrian Peninsula along the Adriatic Sea, Croatian began to replace Vlashki, spoken by the Istrians, what is described as Europe’s smallest surviving ethnic group. But after Istrians began immigrating to Queens, many to escape grinding poverty, they largely abandoned Croatian and returned to speaking Vlashki.

“Whole villages were emptied,” said Valnea Smilovic, 59, who came to the United States in the 1960s with her parents and her brother and sister. “Most of us are here now in this country.”

Mrs. Smilovic still speaks in Vlashki with her mother, 92, who knows little English, as well as her siblings. “Not too much, though,” Mrs. Smilovic said, because her husband speaks only Croatian and her son, who was born in the United States, speaks English and a smattering of Croatian.

“Do I worry that our culture is getting lost?” Mrs. Smilovic asked. “As I get older, I’m thinking more about stuff like that. Most of the older people die away and the language dies with them.”

Several years ago, one of her cousins, Zvjezdana Vrzic, an Istrian-born adjunct professor of linguistics atNew York University, organized a meeting in Queens about preserving Vlashki. She was stunned by the turnout of about 100 people.

“A language reflects a singular nature of a people speaking it,” said Professor Vrzic, who recently published an audio Vlashki phrasebook and is working on an online Vlashki-Croatian-English dictionary.

Istro-Romanian is classified by Unesco as severely endangered, and Professor Vrzic said she believed that the several hundred native speakers who live in Queens outnumbered those in Istria. “Nobody tried to teach it to me,” she said. “It was not thought of as something valuable, something you wanted to carry on to another generation.”

A few fading foreign languages have also found niches in New York and the country. In northern New Jersey, Neo-Aramaic, rooted in the language of Jesus and the Talmud, is still spoken by Syrian immigrants and is taught at Syriac Orthodox churches in Paramus and Teaneck.

The Rev. Eli Shabo speaks Neo-Aramaic at home, and his children do, too, but only “because I’m their teacher,” he said.

Will their children carry on the language? “If they marry another person of Syriac background, they may,” Father Shabo said. “If they marry an American, I’d say no.”

And on Long Island, researchers have found several people fluent in Mandaic, a Persian variation of Aramaic spoken by a few hundred people around the world. One of them, Dakhil Shooshtary, 76, a retired jeweler who settled on Long Island from Iran 45 years ago, is compiling a Mandaic dictionary.

For Professor Kaufman, the quest for speakers of disappearing languages has sometimes involved serendipity. After making a fruitless trip in 2006 to Indonesia to find speakers of Mamuju, he attended a family wedding two years ago in Queens. Mr. Husain happened to be sitting next to him. Wasting no time, he has videotaped Mr. Husain speaking in his native tongue.

“This is maybe the first time that anyone has recorded a video of the language being spoken,” said Professor Kaufman, who founded a Manhattan research center, the Urban Field Station for Linguistic Research, two years ago.

He has also recruited Daowd I. Salih, 45, a refugee from Darfur who lives in New Jersey and is a personal care assistant at a home for the elderly, to teach Massalit, a tribal language, to a linguistic class at New York University. They are meticulously creating a Massalit lexicography to codify grammar, definitions and pronunciations.

“Language is identity,” said Mr. Salih, who has been in the United States for a decade. “So many African tribes in Darfur lost their languages. This is the land of opportunity, so these students can help us write this language instead of losing it.”

Speakers of Garifuna, which is being displaced in Central America by Spanish and English, are striving to keep it alive in their New York neighborhoods. Regular classes have sprouted at the Yurumein House Cultural Center in the Bronx, and also in Brooklyn, where James Lovell, a public school music teacher, leads a small Garifuna class at the Biko Transformation Center in East Bushwick.

Mr. Lovell, who came to New York from Belize in 1990, said his oldest children, 21-year-old twin boys, do not speak Garifuna. “They can get along speaking Spanish or English, so there’s no need to as far as they’re concerned,” he said, adding that many compatriots feel “they will get nowhere with their Garifuna culture, so they decide to assimilate.”

But as he witnessed his language fading among his friends and his family, Mr. Lovell decided to expose his younger children to their native culture. Mostly through simple bilingual songs that he accompanies with gusto on his guitar, he is teaching his two younger daughters, Jamie, 11, and Jazelle, 7, and their friends.

“Whenever they leave the house or go to school, they’re speaking English,” Mr. Lovell said. “Here, I teach them their history, Garifuna history. I teach them the songs, and through the songs, I explain to them what it’s saying. It’s going to give them a sense of self, to know themselves. The fact that they’re speaking the language is empowerment in itself.”

A version of this article appeared in print on April 29, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

Anwari Doel Arnowo

show details 9:51 AM (11 hours ago)

Yth. Pak R….

Mengenai bahasa-bahasa dunia ini saya juga amat menyayangkan kelakuan manusia sehingga banyak bahasa di dunia ini menjadi berkurang  jumlahnya malah ada yang hilang, lenyap, musnah dan sirna. 

Anak-anak saya menguasai bahasa Jawa hanya secara acak saja, karena istri saya selalu berbahasa Jawa saja, ini sesuai permintaan ayah saya kepada istri saya. Sedangkan saya selalu menggunakan Bahasa Indonesia yang baik dan benar, yang secara resmi disingkat di TVRI menjadi BINAR.

Seperti telah menjadi pengetauan umum, siaran TV - TV di negeri kita, itu tidak lagi patuh menggunakan bahasa Indonesia BINAR, tetapi amat didominasi Bahasa Betawi dan dicampuri terlalu banyak bahasa asing, yang pengucapannyapun juga morat marit atau menurut telinga yang normal saja, mengesankan diucapkan oleh orang yang tidak pernah belajar saja. Padahal mereka ini adaah para pembaca berita, pewawancara, para pelaku dan pejabat pemerintahan, termasuk menteri-menteri, berbahasa Indonesia tidak baik. Yang saya ingat baik itu: kalau Bung Karno berbicara resmi dan juga Bung Hatta, Syahrir, Emil Salim dan tentu saja Tuan Badudu dan Tuan Anton Moeliono.

Yang amat disesalkan adalah banyaknya istilah asing yang kebanyakan dicampur aduk dengan "bahasa Inggris" juga "bahasa Arab gaya Indonesia", tetapi sesungguh-sungguhnya ada kata padanan resminya dalam bahsa Nasional kita: Bahasa Indonesia.

Pernah saya baca, bahwa bahasa-bahasa makhluk yang disebut sebagai manusia di Planet Bumi ini, pada saat sekarang jumlahnya ada di sekitar angka 7000 buah atau kurang dari itu, karena menurut yang mengetauinya, telah berkurang sekitar sepuluh bahasa dalam setiap tahun berjalan, sejak lama. 

Di dalam rumah saya saja, bahasa Jawa sudah menurun penggunaannya, demikian juga di rumah-rumah anak-anak saya. Saya sendiri sudah tidak berkesempatan menggunakan bahasa-bahasa asing yang pernah saya gunakan, yakni Jerman dan Jepang. Bahasa belanda saya tidak mau menggunakan dengan sengaja, karena saya benci kepada pemerintah belanda, karena tidak mengakui Proklamasi pada tanggal 17 Agustus 1945 sampai sekarang ini. Itu cara saya pribadi melakukan protes.

Bahasa daerah Palembang dan Banjar serta Sunda sudah banyak yang lupa, sama sekali atau tinggal sedikit saja berupa bahasa percakapan sehari-hari saja.

Demikianlah dunia berputar terus dan semuanya, cepat atau lambat, berubah dengan pasti, meninggalkan pola yang pernah kita kenal pada waktu umur kita masih muda pada jaman dahulu kala. Saya sudah menyiapkan metal menerapkan banyak hal mengenai perubahan itu sejak lama, tetapi kadang kala masih datang waktu yang membuat saya terkejut-kejut. 

THE OLDER I GET, THE BETTER I WAS.

MARI KITA TERTAWAKAN DIRI KITA, HA HA HA AGAR BERKURANG STRESSNYA.

Salam saya,

Anwari Doel Arnowo - 30 April, 2010