FW: Linguistic Contact in East Timor

[David Gil]

Waruno Mahdi wrote:
> But the process of borrowing can sometimes have unexpected, or no
> longer apparent loopholes. The word _bro_ (short for _brother_)
> began to be used some years ago in Malaysia as gender-specific term
> of address to a (male) friend. I noticed recently that it has also
> started to be used by some young Indonesians.
>
> In view of the fact, that _bro_ in (American) English has a quite
> pronounced derogatory meaning (something like "white-trash male"),
> it seems very unlikely that the Malay word was a direct borrowing
> from English. I tentatively suspect, therefore, that the original
> precursor was _brother_ as term of address amongst Afro-Americans,
> and that Malay _bro_ was shortened from _brother_ in Malay itself,
> independently of the shortening to _bro_ in English. Does that
> sound likely?
>   
Well I'm not sure, but here are three reasons to suppose that it was the
shortened form _bro_ in English that was directly borrowed ...

(a) In western Nusantara dialects of Malay/Indonesian, truncation to a
monosyllable usually (if not always) retains the final syllable, rather
than the penultimate, eg. _abang_ > _bang_, _mister_ > _ster_, _Dapit_ >
_pit_.

(b) In eastern Nusantara dialects, eg. Papuan Malay, there is no
productive rule of truncation to monosyllabic forms, eg. _kaka_ > *_ka_
-- and in fact, in Papuan Malay, _bro_ has recently become very widespread.

(c) In Papua at least, my impression is that people -- mostly trendy
teenagers -- who use _bro_ are also likely to associate with other
artifacts of African-American culture, eg. rap music, shoulder bags with
rasta colours, etc., which suggests to me that they borrowed the form
directly from African-American English.  (Which is consistent with other
comments that have been made in recent postings on this subject.)

David

-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistics
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany

Telephone: 49-341-3550321 Fax: 49-341-3550119
Email: gil at eva.mpg.de
Webpage:  http://www.eva.mpg.de/~gil/



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