The other Tanya and her magical life

somewhere on a distant island

Last week I opened my inbox and saw an email notifying me that someone in Tenessee tried to access my TikTok account. Bizarre, because I'd never been to Tennessee.

Nor do I have a TikTok account.

Do you sometimes get emails that aren’t meant for you? I regularly get those.

A few years ago I was mistakenly added to an email list of what seems to be a group of 92-year-olds having exciting weekly get-togethers. Their emails have subject lines like “MOVIE NIGHT THIS SATURDAY!!!!!” or “Bridge night at Archie’s.”

I tried many times to contact these people and tell them that I’m not supposed to be on that list, but it seems that none of them is tech-savvy enough to remove my email address from the cc line.

It’s ok, I’ve come to terms with having to be informed about every detail of their social life. I am even invested in their well-being now and get upset when things don’t work out. Last week’s email was titled “IMPORTANT! We're not going to Sandae's tomorrow evening!!” And I was like, Aw, no Sandae? That’s a shame.

But the most fascinating emails I get are the ones intended for a person called Tanya who lives in Indonesia. These are typically confirmations of restaurant reservations, and emails thanking me for taking a taxi in Bali or asking me (her) if I enjoyed my latest hotel stay.

Those emails are all in Indonesian.

At first, I was annoyed at those. But then they, too, became a pleasant distraction from the daily hurdles of my real life.

I started imagining what the other Tanya’s life must be like, somewhere in distant Indonesia (and how it must be made more difficult by the fact that all her updates go to my email inbox.)

The other Tanya eats a meal at a fancy restaurant in Bali.

The other Tanya hails a taxi ride to the airport.

The other Tanya doesn't check the news every morning to gauge the likelihood of a missile attack or pray that one doesn’t come during her children’s commute to school.

The other Tanya doesn’t lie for an hour on the ground under deadly fireworks.

The other Tanya doesn’t wonder if it’s safe to take her mom to the bank this week considering it is THEIR turn to attack us again.

At first, I thought I should learn Indonesian to be more like the other Tanya.

Then I found out that even though Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia, spoken by 250 million people (too many for my taste), and used in education, administration, and media, it is the native language of only about 20% of the population.

It is therefore highly likely that when not hailing taxis or placing restaurant orders, the other Tanya speaks one of the other 700 languages spoken in Indonesia.

Yes, this is crazy lots of languages. It’s 10% of the world’s languages spoken in one country. This makes Indonesia the second most linguistically diverse nation in the world, after Papua New Guinea.

The other Tanya is probably an islander

I decided that the other Tanya speaks Buru, a language spoken on the island of the same name in Eastern Indonesia.

Why? I don’t know. I just have a feeling.

Buru is an endangered language of the Austronesian language family. Austronesian languages are spoken all over Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Some of the biggest Austronesian languages by number of speakers are Indonesian, Javanese, Sundanese, Tagalog, and Malagasy (all more than 20 million speakers.) Maori also belongs in this large family.

Buru was spoken by around 43,000 people in 1991 when the only grammatical description of the language was written by Charles E. Graham. By 2010 the number of speakers had dwindled to 14,346.

This is going to be an interesting experience.

Apart from Charles E. Graham’s grammar of Buru which I found online (a scanned, not searchable copy¹), there seem to be only two potential learning resources: a 4-hour audio recording of some portions of The New Testament (The Book of Matthew) and a 22-page brochure in Buru, entitled Ma eskotak masin kaki gam doo or “How to care for treadle sewing machines.” (I had to look up the word ‘treadle’ there.)

That’s it. No dictionary. Google Translate, obviously, doesn’t know that this language exists.

This is going to be an interesting learning experience, further complicated by the fact that:

1) the recording of The New Testament comes without a transcript so I only have the audio to go by (plus, I’m a little rusty on the plot details of The Book of Matthew.)

2) the sewing machine care manual isn’t actually available online in its entirety, so, unless I manage to find it, all I have to learn from at this point is the title of the brochure.

It’s ok, I like it when things are complicated like this. I think.

I’m fully aware that I’m not going to learn a lot of Buru. If in two weeks I’ll somehow be able to decipher what they’re saying in the first minute of The Book of Matthew, I’ll be pretty happy.

Wish me luck.

If you’re a writer on Substack, consider recommending Friends with Words to your readers (go to Dashboard>Settings>Publication details>Recommend other publications on Substack). I’ve set out to learn 12 languages in 12 months and maybe even learn, finally, how to care for treadle sewing machines.

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1. Does anybody know if there is a way to make a non-searchable pdf searchable? Seriously, it would make my life so much easier.