Characteristics of the Indonesian language in AX Semantics

Fundamentals

In Indonesian, you need to know the number of a noun to form the corresponding pronouns. Indonesian has neither grammatical case nor gender. There are two numbers: singular and plural.

grammatical name	values	examples
number	singular	rumah tua (old house)
	plural	rumah-rumah tua (old houses)
adjectives (noun)	after noun	apel merah (red apple)
verb tenses	present	dia makan (he eats)

The standard order of a noun phrase in Indonesian is the following:

preposition + numeral + noun + adjective + determiner

See for example:

tentang tiga penyanyi  populer  ini
(about  three  singers   popular  these)
PREP    NUM    NOUN      ADJ      DET
"about these three popular singers"

Lexicon

Nouns

Indonesian nouns inflect for number. Nouns should be added to the lexicon if they do not inflect regularly.

Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.

Examples

The basic lexicon entry for murid (student) contains:

• inflection table for number:

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	murid	murid-murid

Adjectives

In Indonesian, the default position for an adjective is "after noun". Indonesian adjectives do not inflect, so there is no need to add lexical entries for them.

Verbs

Indonesian verbs do not inflect (neither for number, person nor tense) and rather use time adverbs (e.g., kemarin (yesterday)). Take belajar (to study) for example:

dia belajar (he studys)
dia belajar kemarin (he studied yesterday)

saya belajar (I study)
Saya belajar kemarin (I studied yesterday)

Container settings

Determiner

The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Indonesian: demonstratives (distal + proximal) and possessives.

Pronoun

The AX NLG platform supports the following pronouns for Indonesian: personal, demonstratives (distal + proximal), and possessive.

However, Indonesian pronouns are frequently omitted, because it is more common to use a person's name or title to refer to them instead of using a pronoun. For example, instead of saying "Kamu mau pergi? (Do you want to go?)", one might say "Johnny mau pergi? (Does Johnny want to go?)" without personal pronoun.

Numerals

Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit. Take hari (day) for example:

	cardinal	ordinal
text	sembilan hari (nine days)	hari kesembilan (the ninth day)
digit	9 hari (9 days)	- hari ke–9 (the 9th day)

As the above table shows, nouns after cardinals will not be pluralized. Therefore, hari (day) stays in singular because of numeral sembilan (nine). Besides, ordinal numerals usually stand after the noun.

For Indonesian, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 12 on the platform, otherwise (above 12) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:

dua belas mobil
(twelve cars)
vs.
13 mobil
(13 cars)