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Who are You? This was the question that worried me constantly when I first started learning Indonesian. The idea of “You” as a proper noun, “You” as a pronoun that must be capitalized for correct grammar, this concept completely upended what You meant.
As a writer, and a longtime teacher of creative writing, I’ve always stressed the importance of knowing the why of you in writing. To write well, about anything, it matters why you, the writer, choose to write what you write. My long-held belief is that the best work is the one you must write, as opposed to the work you can write. I suppose that’s why I have two or three times the number of discarded drafts as published writing. Or why I seldom accept commissioned work. I do believe a writer must figure out why she’s writing, which work-for-hire doesn’t always allow, and that you have to write a million words to find the thousand that matter.
But this bit of Indonesian grammar scrambled my why of you, at least in Indonesian.
There’s something very appealing about putting an upper case Anda before a lower case saya, which is what such a rule implies. An honorific perhaps, but also a suggestion that “I” is simply not the most important in how we should think about people or personhood.
Certainly, every one of my Indonesian uncles and aunties always serve food to everyone else first with the command makan, makan even when you’re already too full. You always comes before me.
Of course, many other Asian cultures are similar, in contrast to Western ones, which tend to center on the individual.
However, it’s the linguistic reason that’s intriguing, because other languages capitalize You differently — at least, according to ChatGPT via Microsoft CoPilot. For example, Italian may capitalize Lei as the formal you. However, this is a traditional formality, and not required in modern writing. Russian, similarly, capitalizes Вы only in formal address, but this is not required in everyday writing. Only German requires Sie to be capitalized as the formal you, but that’s because sie, lower case, means she or they.
Interestingly, my artificial intelligence source did not list Indonesian in answer to my query. So I challenged it; shouldn’t AI be held accountable for the “facts” it feeds us? One answer is that there’s no lowercase version of Anda. Also, it’s almost like a proper noun, and, apparently, is comparable to writing “Sir” or “Madam” in English, rather than to mean you.
Is that so?
I can hear my late father’s dubious tone, whenever life puzzled and confounded him, because he didn’t simply accept things at face value.
Perhaps we shouldn’t either. I imagine if I were to ask all the Indonesians I know, they’d give me a slightly different answer about the capitalization of Anda. I know my various language teachers did. It’s just what it is, that Anda is capitalized, and when something is simply a fact, we sometimes forget why it ever became a fact in the first place.
But for me, that’s part of the why of you in what I elect to write. As well, the richness of language. Siapa vs. Mengapa. Tetapi vs. tapi.
The importance of studying languages beyond our native or mother tongues is because it opens the mind, and heart, to the subtlety of the human consciousness. The way a language evolves, forming its own rules and grammar, reflects its people and culture. Studying a language opens us up to the possibilities of other ways of being.
Which brings me to my problem, the permasalahan that worries me far more than the capitalization of Anda, my entry point into this essay. That today, our world is overly focused on AI, especially in relation to making money, at the expense of the humanities and arts and other purely academic disciplines. Include in that list the study of languages.
My Indonesian tutors were all well-educated and thoughtful women and men. They cared about teaching the Indonesian language well, but could also share a great deal about the country’s culture, history and current affairs. In my conversation lessons, we discussed Indonesian art, music, movies, history, the origins of customs, what their lives were like. A few also taught Javanese. Some of the tutors had master’s degrees and were versed in linguistics. Others had a lot to say about political parties. I discovered that the Christian tutors could teach me certain aspects of Indonesia while the Muslim tutors opened different windows on the same world. It made my language classes much more than simply learning to speak or read Indonesian.
Often, these classes made for thoughtful conversations.
Yet the modern world has less and less time for thoughtful conversations that don’t have any greater purpose than the exchange of ideas, which is what makes us humans.
Instead, we speak to AI, we want our phones and machines to tell us what to do, we text the person sitting next to us in a coffee shop. Everything in this technologically connected world is about hurrying up to the next thing and the next, to fast and easy answers instead of reading a book, to have “facts” fed to us by whichever channel we listen to or watch and not have to question the why of these facts. To have AI do our homework instead of learning to think critically or to contemplate the underlying structures of human civilization. History, geography, philosophy are fast becoming irrelevant when in pursuit of the next crypto or virtual toy that will make us rich. Art, music, dance, film, photography, literature are pursued more for fame and fortune than for the intrinsic beauty and value of art. We gamble on everything: which sports team will win, which cock will defeat its opponent, which candidate will take the next election.
We don’t waste time on ruminations, such as the reason for the capitalization of Anda.
Or on the why of our existence.
Okay, I admit I’m a grumpy old lady. A curmudgeon. The person who annoyingly reminds you of how things used to be when I was a young woman. But I’m still also a writer who wishes to essay in the truest sense of the word. This noun “essay” which, as a transitive verb, is defined by Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary as to “make an effort to do, accomplish, perform, deal with or venture upon (something difficult or presenting obstacles)”. So if the modern world is a difficult obstacle course, then it’s my job to write “essais” about it, the way Michel de Montaigne did, the French Renaissance philosopher and writer we consider the father of the essay in Western tradition.
In French, essayer means to try, and Montaigne’s essais were reflections on humanity. He didn’t always have answers, but he tried at least to open the conversations and ask the questions. And the entry point to an essai can be anything, even the why of You in Indonesian.
So if I’m that pain-in-the-neck nenek-nenek, it’s because I still believe in words and the
value of all that curious knowledge, and humanity, within any language.
Like Indonesian, and the strange and wonderful Anda who is you, me and everyone. Semuanya.
