Sudah dan belum

(This is a post I probably shouldn’t be writing yet since I know eeeever so little about Indonesian and have only been learning it for three weeks now; the kind of post that when I reread it in two weeks I’ll see that everything I wrote was completely wrong; but I want to write it now so there it is.)

An interestingly ultra-integral structure in Indonesian is sudah vs. belum. Sudah means “already” (or in other contexts, “done”), while “belum” means “not yet.” The two are antonymous. I find sudah and belum fascinating, especially because the way they work is not something I’ve seen in any other language I’ve studied. Once you get a hang for these two words—which you do pretty quickly, but the more you learn, the more pervasive you find them to be—they quickly come to feel irreplaceable. It becomes hard to remember that other languages just use these constructions in specific instances, rather than as their very foundations. Already in English I find myself noticing whenever I casually say either “already” or “not yet”—how much more potent I’d feel these sentences of mine to be if only I were saying them in Indonesian!

Maybe sudah and belum make sense for a language that kind of doesn’t have tenses. (“Kind of”: if you look up information on Indonesian online, all the websites will tell you it’s so easy because it “doesn’t have tenses.” It doesn’t conjugate whatsoever, so if you define tenses as requiring verbs to conjugate, then yes, I guess that’s true; but Indonesian does have specific words to form the future; a past imperfect; a sort-of past-participle [to have-just done something]; and present continuous tenses, just to name the ones I’ve learned so far.) Context is usually the biggest clue as to the tense of what you’re talking about, along with giveaway words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” “Sudah” is very important as another word that fulfills this role: you can only have “already” done something that happened in the past.

I love to think about the dichotomy sudah and belum illustrate. The kind of perspective they necessitate in my mind is that of your life stretched out on a timeline, with at one end the list of the million things you’ve already done up to this present moment, and strung out at the other all the infinite things you’ve never done, also known as all the things you haven’t done “yet.” If you ask a fisherman in Sumatra if he’s ever been to the North Pole, theoretically (that is, according to my language book) he’ll respond “belum,” even though assumedly he doesn’t think he’s ever going to go there. Lots of people like to extrapolate cultural values from linguistic constructions, and I usually find these totally obnoxious (“In English we capitalize “I,” which shows how egocentric we are!”; “Spanish speakers don’t use ‘por favor’ as often as we use ‘please,’ so they must be rude!”), but obviously language and culture are inextricable and absolutely do influence each other in myriad ways. I can’t help but imagine that if “belum” is built into you as thoroughly as it is into the Indonesian language you’re going to have a different sense of the future and its possibilities than someone who has to answer the same questions instead with “No.”

You might be pointing out that actually in English grammar we have a similar idea: “Have you ever been to the North Pole?” is answered by “No, I haven’t.” There’s sort of an implied “yet” hanging off the end there. “Have” speaks for the past-up-till-now only, and leaves future possibilities technically open, even though I’m personally confident I’ll never make it that far north. (Never say never!) I still feel a difference between the “have” construction, which only speaks to the past, versus the “not yet” construction, which speaks to the future. But then, if Indonesian has no “have” tense in the same way, and “belum” is the only ‘translation’ of this, I guess that to say belum only means “not yet” (and at that, only what “not yet” means in English) is inaccurate. But whoops, I can see I’m quickly going to twist myself into philosophy-of-language knots here, so I’m going to extricate myself by changing the subject to cultural notes…

I often have to use belum in a way that’s interesting to my American sensibilities. When asked the common question, “Sudah menikah?” (“Are you married?”, or more literally, “Are you already married?”) I must respond with “belum”—never with “tidak” (“no”)! Skipping past the inevitability built into the “already” construction of the question, to answer “tidak” would be to implicitly say I never plan on marrying…such a distressing thing to tell an Indonesian!

Sudah, on a day-to-day basis, I hear used most commonly in a couple classic expressions: “Sudah makan?” and “Sudah mandi?” These literally translate as “Have you eaten yet?” and “Have you bathed yet?” If my host family is asking me the former and my response is “belum,” that will be their cue to invite me to “makan! Makan!” (Eat!) Similarly, when my host mother comes home she’s sure to want to know if I’ve already mandi’d; I do as soon as I get home in the afternoon, so my answer is always “Ya, sudah.” Mandi’ing, aka bucket bathing, is a topic for another blog post, but the short story is that mandi’ing is both pleasantly refreshing and culturally mandatory in a country with 100% humidity 100% of the time. You absolutely must mandi at least twice a day (though as everyone tells me, “three times is better!”). Indonesians ask each other these questions often as a sign of caring (romantic couples will text each other these things, for instance) and as a way of gathering information about how each others’ days are progressing. Again, there’s the implied dichotomy of inevitability—either you already have, or you soon will, perform these activities—and time comes to feel as if it’s structured around these events themselves, as everything else comes to fall into the “before” or “after” halves. It’s so interesting to me.

(Also, for the record, “Have you eaten yet?” is apparently a common greeting in China, according to my friend who lived there for a year. Wanting to make sure that loved ones’ bellies are full is a cultural universalism.)

One more note about language that I’m intrigued by. I speak Spanish and (well, used to speak) Slovak. I can’t imagine I’ll ever learn another foreign language better than I know Spanish. (But never say never!) My Slovak skills were at an intermediate level, though I could speak at a fast conversational pace. Even after four months in Spain and ten in Argentina, no matter how good my Spanish got, I almost never felt that strange magic I had when speaking Slovak. Namely, the ability to open my mouth and hear the other language come out without any internal processing in my mind beforehand; to have my tongue know the language for me. I speak Spanish quickly and I certainly don’t have to think about how I’m going to say lots of simpler things. But maybe the difference is that although when I speak Spanish I am thinking in Spanish, the point is there’s still some kind of thinking involved. It’s still a step removed from my experience speaking English, where sure, I’m welcome to internally note the way I’m stringing my words along if need be; but if I’m having a routine conversation that doesn’t require an extra level of care, I won’t be consciously thinking at all, and certainly not about my language choices. Words will come out to fit the situation and that’s that.

The latter is something I did experience in Slovak. I assumed the difference in my experiences with Spanish versus Slovak must be in the way I learned the two languages: in school, systematically, versus mainly through listening and speaking in an immersive environment. I think that hunch is being proved correct, as I’ve already experienced the non-thinking phenomenon in Indonesian, despite that I know so little Indonesian. It’s taken me by surprise each time. There’s a very fine line between what I’m describing and what I have in Spanish, which is a lightning-fast -but still there!- collection of ideas. To be fair, I can’t help but think mental language retrieval is going to be a lot faster if you simply know less: if I have only a hundred data points in Slovak to my ten thousand in Spanish; if I have the skills to say the exactly correct thing in Spanish if only I take the extra .04 of a second to make sure it comes out right (whereas I’ll probably decline that male-plural adjective in the genitive wrong in Slovak anyway, so what’s the point?); then sure, I can guess what language will come out quicker. Now I’m in an interesting position where again I’m learning a language in immersion, but it’s also a relatively much easier language (compared to Slovak!!!) and I’ve got double the time to get good at it. I’m really curious to see how this turns out.