8/14/10

Traveling by bus, especially in Sumatra, you're bound to see signs which are actually in Indonesian languages, but act like English homophones.  It makes things even stranger that Bahasa Indonesia has no concrete spelling, so the same word can be spelled many ways, or there can be regional, dialect variations.  This also means that any recognizable English loan words (like "business") could easily be spelled two or three different ways.  I'm sure this is also true with the hundreds of languages in Indonesia, most of which use Westernized script.

English homophones I've seen on signs in Sumatra:

Cat oven (I believe this means "kiln")
Door smeer (This means a car/motorcycle polish)
Air (This means water or any liquid)
Semen (This means "cement")
Tie rod (Can't figure this one out!)

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