Introduction to multilingua.info's Austronesian section
Welcome to multilingua.info's Indonesian/Tagalog/Hawaiian pages. These three languages are members of the Austronesian family, a far-flung family stretching from Madagascar to Malaysia to Easter Island.
The three languages in question have much in common but much that separates them. This section of multilingua.info is going to start with vocabulary because it is here that the most obvious intersection among the languages occurs.
In terms of grammar, there are some vast separations among the languages, owing in part to the circumstances in which they evolved. The main commonality is the use of numerous particles in numerous positions in lieu of complex veb conjugations or noun declensions. But from there the similarities trail off.
While Hawaiian doesn't quite have gender, to my thinking, it might as well. Different nouns call for different sorts of particles around them and while phonetic rules supposedly govern this, there are enough exceptions that a truly fluent speaker must know whether ke or ka serves as the definite article just as surely as a speaker of French must know whether le or la is called for.
Tagalog has no gender for nouns but there's a fairly complex morphology for verbs. And then there's blessed Indonesian. Indonesian started as a medium of exchange among different tribes in the center of that island nation, combining elements of several different languages. When the Dutch arrived, they used it to conduct trade and added a slew of their own vocabulary, the end result being "Pesar Malay" - Bazaar Malay. Finally, in its journey to independence, Indonesia adapted and standardized Bazaar Malay as a common language among the various Indonesian peoples, with their hundreds of local languages.
The beauty of Indonesian's history is that at each turn, new non-natives were shaping and using it... while failing to understand all the finer points and communicating anyway. Because of this, Indonesian sometimes seems almost grammar optional. If you want to convey careful, subtle meanings, traditional forms exist to do so. But if you just want the fish and rice dinner, you can get by with "Mau ikan dan nasi" (Want fish and rice) and not only is your meaning conveyed, but the sentence is perfectly correct.
Because of the features of the languages under study, this site - at least at its beginnings - will do the best job for you with Indonesian. Since there's little grammar, our failure to teach it won't matter. For Hawaaian and Tagalog, we'll be giving you some basic words and phrases adequate for pointing and conveying meaning, but until we've brushed up ourselves the grammar offerings will be pretty sparse.
Offering the fair warning that no one at multilingua.info is a native speaker of these languages, we'd like to issue a call to those who are. If you find an error or see a good way to explain something we haven't quite got across, please send an email to languages-at-gbarto.com and we'll make the changes and credit you (include your name and a link to your own language site - if applicable).
The three languages in question have much in common but much that separates them. This section of multilingua.info is going to start with vocabulary because it is here that the most obvious intersection among the languages occurs.
In terms of grammar, there are some vast separations among the languages, owing in part to the circumstances in which they evolved. The main commonality is the use of numerous particles in numerous positions in lieu of complex veb conjugations or noun declensions. But from there the similarities trail off.
While Hawaiian doesn't quite have gender, to my thinking, it might as well. Different nouns call for different sorts of particles around them and while phonetic rules supposedly govern this, there are enough exceptions that a truly fluent speaker must know whether ke or ka serves as the definite article just as surely as a speaker of French must know whether le or la is called for.
Tagalog has no gender for nouns but there's a fairly complex morphology for verbs. And then there's blessed Indonesian. Indonesian started as a medium of exchange among different tribes in the center of that island nation, combining elements of several different languages. When the Dutch arrived, they used it to conduct trade and added a slew of their own vocabulary, the end result being "Pesar Malay" - Bazaar Malay. Finally, in its journey to independence, Indonesia adapted and standardized Bazaar Malay as a common language among the various Indonesian peoples, with their hundreds of local languages.
The beauty of Indonesian's history is that at each turn, new non-natives were shaping and using it... while failing to understand all the finer points and communicating anyway. Because of this, Indonesian sometimes seems almost grammar optional. If you want to convey careful, subtle meanings, traditional forms exist to do so. But if you just want the fish and rice dinner, you can get by with "Mau ikan dan nasi" (Want fish and rice) and not only is your meaning conveyed, but the sentence is perfectly correct.
Because of the features of the languages under study, this site - at least at its beginnings - will do the best job for you with Indonesian. Since there's little grammar, our failure to teach it won't matter. For Hawaaian and Tagalog, we'll be giving you some basic words and phrases adequate for pointing and conveying meaning, but until we've brushed up ourselves the grammar offerings will be pretty sparse.
Offering the fair warning that no one at multilingua.info is a native speaker of these languages, we'd like to issue a call to those who are. If you find an error or see a good way to explain something we haven't quite got across, please send an email to languages-at-gbarto.com and we'll make the changes and credit you (include your name and a link to your own language site - if applicable).
