# Malay/Indonesian: hutan / utan



## qrokjae

The word for "forest" in Malay/Indonesian is "hutan", why in the word "orangutan", it loses the letter "h"?
I kown the letter "h" is a very light sound or even silent in "hutan", but that is apparently not the reason, because when we use "hutan" by itself, the "h" can not be omitted.


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## Cenzontle

I know very little Indonesian, and I don't have an answer, but I can make the following observations:
1. The loss of "h" is *not *due to the preceding "ng", as we have verb forms such as "menghubungkan", "menghujani", "penghuni", etc.
2. The absence of "h" is *not* only in the borrowed, internationalized forms of the word:
The Wikipedia articles on the creature in both Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Melayu give, as their first spelling, "orang utan" (two words).
(Could this have been *borrowed back* into those languages from an international form?)*
3. I made a similar query last year about the movie title "Ruma Maida"; I was told that the loss of "h" from "rumah" ('house') might be Jakarta dialect or just fast speech.
*P.S.:
qrokjae, this may be the answer!
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ gives the origin as


> Apparently [from] Malay _orang utan_ person of the forest (*although the compound is not the Malay term for the animal, except in recent use*: see note) < _orang_ person + _utan_ (also as _hutan_ ) forest, probably via Dutch...


The note in the _OED_ goes on to say


> In some recent Malay dictionaries, however, _orang (h)utan _is listed in this sense, although the preferred term is _mawas_


So probably the "h" was lost when the word (or phrase) was "filtered" through Dutch or other non-Malay languages.


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## entangledbank

To me the _OED_ discussion suggested the European languages mostly borrowed the name from each other, the first taker being Dutch, and the persistence of the final _-ng_ in the common form _orang-utang_ (under various spellings) looks like another error preserved by borrowing. Malay/Indonesian doesn't in general alternate  and zero (or of course [n] and [ŋ]).

The Indonesian article in the first paragraph says "yang hidup di *hutan* tropika Indonesia dan Malaysia" ("which lives in the tropical *forest* of Indonesia and Malaysia"), and then for the etymology says it comes from two Malay words, ". . . dan 'utan' yang berarti hutan" ("and 'utan' which means forest"). So _utan_ hardly seems to be any sort of normal alternative to the standard word _hutan_. The _OED_'s entry is revised (3rd edition), so if they say there's a Malay _utan_, I suppose there must be.


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## Cenzontle

The Malay dictionary that I checked has many cross-references between forms with and without initial "h", including "utan = hutan".
I wonder if this means there are dialects that consistently drop those h's.
If so, it's possible that the Dutch first heard it through one of those h-less dialects, and it would not be necessary to blame foreigners for the loss of /h/.

The _OED_ gives this 1903 quote of an 1850 source: "the Kayan of Borneo are said [...] to know it as orang-utan".
Wikipedia classifies Kayan as an Austronesian "dialect cluster", but doesn't say how similar it might be to Malay.  (Do the Kayans have /h/ in their language?)

How did the meaning of "orang (h)utan" get transferred from "_Homo sapiens_ of the forest" to _Pongo pygmaeus_ (alias "mawas")?

The _OED_ further explains:


> There is some evidence for the occasional use of the compound in Malay in its literal sense to refer to a member of a specific forest-dwelling people in Sumatra [...], but none for its original use for the animal, and it must therefore be assumed to have been a regional use or a descriptive collocation used to explain the animal to early travellers to the area.



Related note:  The Google Books Ngram Viewer seems to indicate that the short form "orang" was more frequent, in books, than "orangutan" until after 1970!


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## qrokjae

Thank you Cenzontle, your answer is very detailed and useful.


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## Cenzontle

> Do the Kayans have /h/ in their language?


Evidently they do, according to the webpage "Kayan phrasebook".


> "the Kayan of Borneo are said [...] to know it as orang-utan"


Do many Kayan words resemble the corresponding Malay/Indonesian words?  Apparently not, judging from the same webpage.
Is it likely that the Kayan would have borrowed such basic words as "man" and "forest" from a foreign language?
I think it's healthy to maintain our skepticism about this.


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