Cenzontle said:
I am not an expert on Indonesian, but these are from my Indonesian/English dictionary:
breakfast > makanan pagi
lunch(eon) > makan tengah hari, makan siang
dinner > makan(an) malam
supper > makanan malam
makan = to eat
makanan = food
pagi = morning
tengah hari = midday
siang = daytime
malam = night
I'm not sure how strictly the boundaries between makan as a verb and makanan as a noun are kept.
This is from the closed thread in the Etymology forum, but I thought I'd reply anyway because there's a lot of confusion about verbs like
makan, even among Indonesians.
There's a strict boundary between the verb
makan and the derivative noun
makanan, and
makan siang ≠
makanan siang.
Makan siang is lunch,
makanan siang would refer to food typically served in the early afternoon, a lunch dish.
So if
makan is strictly a verb, how can
makan siang be a noun meaning lunch? All Indonesian verbs can act as verbal nouns in unchanged form:
Dia berenang setiap pagi. He swims every morning.
Berenang sangat baik untuk kesehatan. Swimming is very good for your health.
Dia makan siang bersama keluarganya. He eats lunch with his family.
Makan siang membuat saya mengantuk. Eating lunch makes me sleepy.
Note that although
dia makan siang looks like a transitive verb "he eats lunch", it's actually an intransitive verb with a complement, "he eats in the early afernoon" = he lunches.
Makan siang as a verbal noun therefore literally means "Eating in the early afternoon" = lunch. In contrast,
makanan siang consists of two nouns, the 2nd modifying the 1st: "food of/for the early afternoon" = food typically served in the afernoon, a lunch dish. Cf. English "late-night snack".
Indonesians get confused because
makan is a base verb (like
pergi,
datang, masuk, tinggal, bangun, etc.) which doesn't require any prefixes or suffixes. Strictly speaking, all verbs of this type are intransitive, and we must add affixes to make them transitive active or passive:
dia masuk he enters
dia memasuki rumah he enters the house
rumah dimasuki pencuri the house was entered by thieves
harimau makan the tiger eats
harimau memakan kancil the tiger eats the deer
kancil dimakan harimau the deer is eaten by the tiger
In colloquial Indonesian, however, we use the intransitive base as active transitive verbs:
dia masuk rumah he enters the house,
dia makan nasi he eats rice.
Memakan sounds like an intensive "to eat up, completely consume", rather than simply the official transitive active form. So we tend to think of
makan as a transitive verb, yet in a phrase like
makan siang,
siang is clearly not the object: we don't eat the early afternoon. Unconsciously we may therefore think of
makan siang as a compound noun, like
buku sekola schoolbook, rather than as a nominalized verb phrase, and some people explain it to foreigners as if
makan is used in the place of
makanan.
As for the names of the meals, we mostly say:
breakfast =
sarapan (
pagi)
lunch =
makan siang (
makan tengahari is Malaysian)
dinner =
makan malam