On behalf of East Timor’s national language
authority, the Instituto Nacional de Linguística, I should like to
address fourteen points contained in Dr Sean Foley’s piece "The
article by Alfred Deakin and the reply from Geoffrey Hull deserve
comment" which adds new errors to those made by the original
correspondent.
1. There are not thirty languages in East Timor, but sixteen. Dr
Foley apparently does not have sufficient knowledge of the linguistic
environment of East Timor or enough familiarity with the principles of
language classification to be able to make the requisite distinction
between a language and a dialect.
2. The East Timorese Justice Minister’s personal preference for the
use of Portuguese should not be misinterpreted as ignorance of Tetum.
The cocksure tone of Dr Foley’s assertion suggests that he at some
time personally administered a Tetum language examination to Dr. Ana
Pessoa.
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3. That Indonesian is widely known and spoken by younger people in
East Timor should surprise or impress no-one, given the systematic
manner in which it was imposed on the country after 1975. A fact about
which Dr Foley appears to be ignorant is that before 1975 the Indonesian
language was virtually unknown in Portuguese Timor. There are
well-documented cases of 19th century Malay-speaking visitors
to the territory being amazed that almost no-one there knew Malay. This
fact—and the flimsy 24-year pedigree of Indonesian in East Timor—stand
in stark contrast with the Pan-Indonesian sentiments behind Dr Foley’s
assertion that Malay "belongs to the people of the [Malay]
archipelago", of which he evidently sees East Timor as an integral
part, culturally as well as geographically. Despite the popular tendency
to simplify all complex things, the world is full of anomalies, and East
Timor is one of them.
4. That Dr Foley does not "recall ever hearing Timorese using
Portuguese among themselves" makes no difference whatsoever to the
observable fact that numerous East Timorese (particularly clergy,
politicians, intellectuals, teachers and artists) frequently use
Portuguese in conversation with Timorese peers. It is doubtful in any
case that Dr Foley — whose chief linguistic accomplishment apart from
English appears to be fluent Indonesian — was qualified to distinguish
Portuguese and the acrolectal register of Tetum which draws heavily on
Portuguese and appropriates its phonological inventory.
5. If Dr Foley’s intention was to offer an objective corrective to
my alleged errors, his reference to Tetum speakers "littering their
conversation with Indonesian" (no epithet) and with "bits of
mangled Portuguese" (negative epithets) would appear to be a
particularly unfortunate revelation of parti pris.
6. The assertion that my stating (not "suggesting") the
verifiable fact that two thirds of the vocabulary of Tetum is Portuguese
"is to suggest that Tetum is not an indigenous language"
proves not a "delightful self-contradiction" on my part, but
Dr Foley’s naivete in matters of language. Many languages have
vocabularies of predominantly foreign, not native, origin, and the most
famous example of this in the world is English. If, in Foleyian
linguistics, the large Portuguese component in Tetum makes Tetum a
non-indigenous language, then neither is English (with its majority of
French, Latin and Greek words) an indigenous language of England.
7. The figures produced by the UN Development Report do not
constitute a clear "refutation of Hull’s implicit assertion that
Portuguese is widely understood" but proof of the fact that this
body was not qualified to conduct a linguistic census with all this
implies of gathering accurate information about active and passive
knowledge of languages, bilingualism, polyglossia, diglossia and so on.
There is nothing in Dr Foley’s reply that effectively refutes on
scientific grounds my statement — based on direct empirical
observation — that Tetum speakers have a natural ability to understand
a good deal of Portuguese.
8. Dr Foley’s objections to the Portuguese language (and perhaps to
Tetum also) on frankly utilitarian and philistine grounds are
unanswerable by those who consider languages to play a wider role in the
social, cultural and spiritual lives of human beings than that of mere
media of rational communication.
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9. Equally unanswerable is the claim that the reinstatement of
Portuguese is "a craven reversion to colonialism." Such
statements — against which all the facts, Timorese patriotic sentiment
and hundreds of learned studies are impotent — can only be made by
those with a breathtakingly vast ignorance of East Timorese culture and
history.
10. That Dr Foley finds the Tetum epithet lorosa’e ‘eastern’
romantic and the Portuguese epithet leste "boring"
makes no difference to the fact that both words mean exactly the same
thing (and Portuguese leste, of French and ultimate Germanic
derivation, also originally referred to the rising sun). Linguistic
facts in any case transcend political arrangements: the Tetum name of
East Timor is Timór Lorosa’e, and the Portuguese synonym is Timor-Leste
or Timor Oriental.
11. The results of the consultation of the Planning Commission which
produced a "clear, explicit and vocal, almost universal, rejection
of Portuguese as an official language" contrast with the results of
the CNRT’s district-to-district consultation on the draft
Constitution, which showed overwhelming support for Article 13 (on
language) one year later. This may explain the suppression of the
results of the 2000 survey in the final report.