Last week, I was listening to some Indonesian news through SBS, one of Australia’s publicly-funded broadcasters. They do a range of news programs in many languages, and it’s a great learning resources. Now, normally, when listening to Indonesian I can make out the general gist of a story even if I don’t know the meaning of every word. It’s pretty easy to figure out the general tone and statements, but it’s going too fast for me to do a word-to-word translation (currently). So I could tell there was a story about the new Pope, Leo. For starters, they said Leo. Another helpful thing was that the soundbites they play are in English. But also, I don’t live under a rock.

Then, they started talking about this whale. Where does the whale come into it? I had no idea. How could this whale possibly be connected to the Papacy? To the Vatican? A new whale in the Vatican? What on Earth? I thought I had to be mishearing it. Maybe they were actually using a different word and I had merely gotten confused. But no, loud and clear, I heard it multiple more times – paus, definitely the Indonesian word for whale.

Confused, I turned to the ever-trusty Google Translate, which helpfully told me that while, yes, paus is the word for whale (and this is the most common use of the word), is is also the word for the Pope. Sadly, there is no new whale hanging out in the Vatican – it’s just Leo again.

I was curious where the word came from. After all, it seems strange that the word could mean two very different things, etymologically. And that’s right — it’s an interesting story! The word paus (meaning whale) comes from Malay, which was the proto-Indonesian language that spread around the archipelago as a trading language. That paus has its roots in the proto-languages of that region.
On the other hand, the word paus (meaning Pope) is a loanword (that is, a word taken directly from another language through an act of borrowing, like croissant in English) from Dutch. And paus in the original Dutch is of course their word for the Pope. Mystery solved!
(If you didn’t know, the Dutch were the invading force of Indonesia during the height of the Dutch East Indies Empire).

Do you have any situations like this in your bi-lingual journey? Let me know in the comments below — I’d be delighted to hear other confused language learners.