A fellow book club member has recently told me that my favorite novel, One hundred years of solitude , has been translated into Bahasa Malaysia by Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka. I was ecstatic until she revealed to me the title, Sumpah tujuh keturunan !

Aiyo, I almost died!

Written by Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez in its original Spanish language as Cien anos de soledad in 1967, it has been translated into many languages (I've read the English edition eight times, Chinese edition twice, and am reading the French edition), but none of them carry a title other than it's intended one in their respective languages.

But this letter is not about this book per se ; those who're interested in the topic should read Milan Kundera's Testament Betrayed (that goes for those who cried jihad over Salman Rushdie's Satanic verses , too).

Okay, what's my point? The point is the sorry state of the Malay language. We aren't even sure if it's Bahasa Malaysia or Bahasa Melayu, nobody knows. The Star referred to it as Bahasa Melayu recently in a report on SPM results; government officials refer to it as Bahasa Malaysia when addressing the nation, Bahasa Melayu when addressing the Malays, back to Bahasa Malaysia when addressing non-Malays. Go figure.

Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka has spent an awful amount of time and energy turning English words into psuedo-English words pretending to be Malay words, some of them you can't even pronounce.

I just wonder, with the immense population of Indonesia, why can't we work more closely with them in developing a more comprehensive Malay language (at least the written language); we're the Malay Archipelago, after all, aren't we? By calling it Bahasa Malaysia, we are limiting it to a national language, but if we call it Bahasa Melayu, we can include the Indonesian language, can't we?

I've been thinking, maybe the malaise of our government can be blamed on the language too. You see, the Malay language doesn't really have a word for 'government'; ' kerajaan ' cannot be government as ' raja ' is 'king', hence ' kerajaan ' should mean something like 'kingship', and I might add here that our government is certainly behaving like a rotten king (or keraja-rajaan , as in kebudak-budakan ).

What about ' pemerintah '? That won't cook, too, I'm afraid, for ' perintah ' means order, ' pemerintah ' will mean someone who rules by decree; again, that's exactly how our government seems to rule. But still, it's not 'government'.

Years ago, I came across a word in the magazine Gila-Gila : the word was ' gomen ', pronounced with an accent, like GO-MERN, I really like that word, I think it's more legitimate than both ' kerajaan ' and ' pemerintah '. Maybe Dewan Bahasa Dan Pustaka should work more closely with Gila-Gila instead of Oxford.