Comparative study of compound words in English and Indonesian Fransiska Napitupulu

Compounding

In some of those example we have just consider, there is a joining of two separate words to produce a single form. Compounding is one of the most important word information processes that may create and enrich the vocabulary of the English words.

Conversion

Conversion may be defined as a process by which a word belonging to one word class is transferred to another word class without any concomitant change or form, either pronounciation or spelling. In this fact, this word-formation process occurs so regularly that many scholars prefer to consider it as a matter of syntactic usage rather than as word- formation ( by Bauer 1983:227). For example: the use of uncountable nouns as countable, ‘some beer / coffe sugar / tea’. Whereas in ‘two beers / coffes sugars / teas’, the nouns are countable. As a general rule, if the context is carefully chosen.

Blends

A blends may be defined as a new lexeme built from parts of two words in such a way that the constituent parts are usually easily identifiable. For instance, brunch ( breakfast + lunch), slanguage ( slang + language), infotainment( information + entertaiment).

Shortenings

Shortening which is notice able in blending, is event more apparent in the process describe as shortening. This occcurs when a word of more than one syllable ( for example telephone) is reduce to a shorter form (phone), often in casual speech. Other example: flu ( influenza), plane ( aeroplane).

Word Formation in Bahasa Indonesia

A large number of the words used in the Bahasa Indonesia are formed by combining root words with affixes and other combining forms. Knowing how affixes are used is the key to understanding the meanings of derived words and in learning to read bahasa Indonesia. There are a relatively small number of Indonesian affixes in common usage and bahasa Indonesia is still very much a root-based language with nice complete word "families". This is in contrast to English where there are many more affixes from diverse sources and the study of root words and their "families" is not as useful.