THE AJIP ROSIDI IN ME

I taught myself how to read many years ago, on a hot day when I was feeling alone. My sisters were at school, Mom was away with my baby bro, Dad was at work (as always), and Grandma was busy cooking.

I was less than 5 years old, capable of recognising alphabets and their sounds, without knowing how it all started. I didn’t know how to write my name, because of its English spelling. But I figured out myself how to write the nickname my parents gave me, because it is a simple three-letter word. This ability that I had to study things without others’ help, sadly, deteriorated a bit when I entered school and started having teachers.

Anyway, struggling to teach myself to read using my sister’s old book, I came across these lines written in big, bold letters:

ini kerbau
kerbau pak madi dua ekor

I ran hastily to Grandma, demanding angrily: “Am I wrong, or is it really written here ‘kerbau pak madi dua ekor?’ “
“Why, Honey, you read it correctly,” said Grandma.
“No. Impossible. Either I was wrong, or they printed the wrong name.”
“And why is it impossible?” Grandma chuckled.
“Because there is no such name as Pak Madi. That is a very ugly name. Impossible.”
Grandma broke out in laughter and the story of The Impossibly-Named Pak Madi circulated around our neighborhood for days.

Another day, while reading a more sophisticated book where there were two-letters consonants (i.e: Bobo magazine), I found a curious word: ‘d a g i n g’.

“Dagin---“ I read it, feeling it with my tongue. “Dagin—“ I knew this word. It was in my everyday vocabulary. Daging! Daging! But I hadn’t known it was spelled that way.

I ran to Grandma again, asking her to spell the word ‘d a g i n g’.
“D-A-G-I-NG”, she said, pronouncing the “ng” like a mosquito buzzing.
“Impossible!” I protested again. For two consonants to form one sound was too inconsistent to be possible for me. I had no words to explain it to my Grandma, but I knew if ‘a’ had one sound, ‘b’ had one sound, etc., then the sound of ‘ng’ had to have its own single alphabet. We shouldn’t have used two alphabets for a single sound.

To my eldest sister, I said: “We must make an alphabet for “ng”. Look, it can be this symbol here: “<”. And there must be an alphabet for “ny” too. We can use “>” as an alphabet having the “ny” sound. Because one alphabet makes one sound. We cannot use two alphabets, like “n” and “g” to make one sound.”

My sister looked at me with a horrified look in her face, as if I had just mentioned a dirty word. So I kept my mouth shut.

Until more than 25 years later.

Yesterday, in a column in Kompas daily, Ajip Rosidi wrote that using two alphabets to produce one sound is one of the many inconsistencies of EYD. “We should be brave enough to make our own alphabets,” he wrote further, “Vietnam for instance, uses many symbols comprehended only by the Vietnamese, in addition to the Latin alphabets.”

Reading that, I wanted to scream: I salute you, Brother Grandfather!

I wanted to scream to my sister: “Look!! Look!!! Somebody actually has the same idea with me, remember when I told you about the “<” and “>” symbols?”

I want to continue writi< this blog usi< that symbols I made up lo< time ago, but hell, conformist that I am, I’d rather not to puzzle my readers and keep my ego down instead.

Uhm.

It may take me 25 years to realise my idea has a sense in it, but still, the realisation feels nice. It’s nice knowing within the scattered foolishness which is my brain, I have a bit of Ajip Rosidi’s thinking inside of me.