Education & Study

"It seems like", "it feels as if", "it's said that"… what exactly are these its referring to?

These are called impersonal verbs. And the it in question is called a dummy pronoun. They don't really point to anything, but rather, they highlight the action — what's being done.

What's interesting about these expressions is that, when translated to a language like, say, Indonesian, they completely change form.

It is time to … --> Waktunya …

From dummy pronoun–copula–noun–preposition in English to noun-nya in Indonesian. Here's some more examples, but this time it becomes verb-nya.

It seems like … --> Kelihatannya … / Sepertinya …

"Indonesian is the cutest language because every word ends with 'nya'."

-nya (/ɲa/) is an enclitic — that is, something functionally similar to a suffix, but can be classified as its own word — in the Indonesian language. It has various functions, such as

1. substituting second- and third-person pronouns This works for the genitive and accusative forms of pronouns, i.e., you can see it replace his or him, but not he. This -nya can be attached to many types of words, like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and prepositions. You can see this in sentences like: • Bapak punya uang. Uangnya banyak. ('Dad has money. His money's plentiful.') • Halo, namanya siapa? ('Hello, what's your name?') → In Indonesian, who is used when asking for names. • Aku memberikan mobil aku kepadanya. ('I gave my car to them.') • Pasha membelikannya nasi. ('Pasha bought him rice.')

2. to refer to something that is known or was mentioned prior This…

If you've read my previous post, forget everything you've read. Nobody actually speaks Indonesian like that. Welcome to informal spoken Indonesian, particularly the one colloquially spoken in South Jakarta. The syntax in spoken Indonesian is way freer than written Indonesian, but it emphasizes a topic–comment syntax structure like Japanese and Korean. You Indonesian speakers probably never even noticed that we have this feature.

What is a Topic?

You're probably wondering what a topic and comment are. Unlike a subject, the topic of a sentence serves to change the… topic, or theme of a conversation. There are two components at play: the topic and the comment — the topic is the one being introduced into the conversation, and the comment is what's being said about the topic. In natural languages, the topic of a sentence tends to get placed in front. A lot of the time, topics and subjects serve the…

Indonesian is an agglutinative (i.e. the language's affixes usually only represent one morpheme) and somewhat isolating (i.e. has a close-to-one morpheme-to-word ratio) language that exists as a variety of Malay, which came to be in 1928.

Nominal Phrases

Cardinals are placed before nouns. Noun labels are usually placed after the main noun. Adjectives, possessors, and determiners are also placed after nouns.

satu buku cerita biru-ku itu

one book story blue-I that

"that one blue storybook of mine"