One of my birthday presents to myself was a new dictionary, "A Learner's Dictionary of Today's Indonesian", which doesn't just give meanings of words but is full of other little titbits as well.
Max, without looking it up, what would you guess the meaning of Indonesian
benua to be? The dictionary mentions it as an old Austronesian word and gives the Maaori equivalent.
And for wordcrazy, the dictionary also mentions that Indonesian
tulisan, handwriting or something written, is from the same root as the Tagalog
tulisan, which apparently means bandit. The ancestral
tulis means sharp-pointed, and the two languages settled for different things to do with sharp-pointed objects: one went for the pen, the other for the sword.
Bingley
