When President Yudhoyono ("SBY") apologised for the haze caused by fires started in Indonesia's Sumatra, he spoke in Bahasa Indonesia. ST (June 25) reported it, quoting SBY as referring to Singapore and Malaysia as "brothers":
Hmmm. There is no equivalent term for "brother" in Bahasa. There is "abang" which means an "elder brother" and there is "adik", which refers to a younger brother. Likewise, in Hokkien, we have "Ah Hia" for elder brother and "Ah Tee" for younger brother. Since I was No 5 in a family of five brothers, I had to call Bro No 1 "Tua Hia", Bro No 2 "Jee Hia", etc, with the prefix "Tua" denoting "Big" (haha, Big Brother!) and the prefix "Jee" denoting "Two", and so on. Because I was the only one (apart from my sis How Eng) living in Pulau Bukom as a boy, each time I visited the rest of the family on the mainland, I had to respectfully call my brothers Jee Hia, Sar Hia, etc (BB lived in Malaysia). One day, I discovered they had started calling each other by name! Ha! From that day, as far as I was concerned, it was How Tiong, How Teng...
But I digressed.
So, did SBY use "adik" to refer to his country's two smaller neighbours (one of which was even called the Little Red Dot by one of SBY's predecessors)? I don't have the Bahasa version of his speech, so I won't know.
TODAY (June 25), reporting the same speech, used the term "relatives" instead:
Now that would be "keluarga" or even "famili". But if SBY had meant "siblings", that would be "adik beradik" (the Hokkien equivalent would be "hia-tee").
TODAY also reported Indonesian Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Jero Wacik as resorting to using the term "friends" (albeit in an admonishing tone), and then -- gosh! -- "husband and wife"! Was he hinting at a menage a trios sort of entanglement?...
So, when reading newspaper stories, and you take the trouble to read between the lines, you may be able to read more into them.
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To wrap up, relatively speaking, I thought of rehashing an old joke based on the riddle "Who's your father's son?" I found this variation titled "The real reason why Anwar was kicked out":
http://forums.hardwarezone.com.sg/eat-drink-man-woman-16/old-political-joke-4067014-2.html
(The link above has three other old political jokes too.)
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