Singularity on the Plane

In Bahasa Indonesia, the prefix -an is a very powerful grammatical construct. Here I will discuss one of its uses, to make an informal verb from a noun.

Given a noun, by attaching -an to its end we can create a verb which means “to do something with the noun”. An example noun is Internet. Using the -an prefix, we can make internetan which means “to access the Internet”:

Aku mau internetan di perpus.
I’m going to access the Internet in the library.

Note that it is colloquial, so you shouldn’t use it in formal writing. Here are more examples:

sepeda (bicycle) -> sepedaan (to ride bicycle)
Dia lagi sepedaan di lapangan.
He’s riding bike at the field.

pacar (girlfriend/boyfriend) -> pacaran (to date someone)
Anto lagi pacaran.
Anto is out on a date.

PS (Playstation) -> PS-an (to play the Playstation)
Belajar! Jangan PS-an terus!
Study! Don’t play Playstation all the time!

Sikat ((tooth)brush) -> sikatan (to brush the teeth)
Udah sikatan?
Have you brushed your teeth?

The hard part is that you can’t just slap it to any noun. It might be correct gramatically but nobody use it so it will sound weird. For example, TV-an (supposedly “to watch TV”) is never used. So are “rokokan” (supposedly “to smoke”), “kursian” (supposedly “to sit”), and “sapuan” (supposedly “to sweep”). I don’t think there is an easy rule to sort the nouns. You just have to figure it out by immersing yourself in the language.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 12th, 2007 at 10:38 am by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Bahasa Indonesia, Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.