Bahasaku

When I was teaching in Jakarta I also moonlighted as a translator. Since nobody ever gave me feedback on my translations, I was pretty confident about my Indonesian language competence. I felt superior when I compared myself to other Medan Chinese Indonesian, languagewise. After all, Indonesian is my mother tongue. And I was born in Medan, the homeland and source of bahasa Melayu (Indonesian, not Malaysian), which is the root of Indonesian language. Moreover, my adoptive relatives from Mom’s side are mostly Malayus. So when I was offered an editing/proofreading job, I quite confidently took it on. My employer happened to be Chinese Indonesian, but she moved to the US when she was 11 and went to school there. She does not speak BI very well, but unfortunately (or fortunately) she consulted KBBI (The Official Indonesian Language Dictionary) a lot. And so she gave me feedback. And from there I realized how little I know of my own language (Hey, it’s MY language, and I AM native, I was born there. I’m not indigenous, and neither are you, unless you come from one of the aboriginal tribes, who are still living in the forests now. Yes, I am, even though the Indonesian government never granted my application for citizenship, for which I’m still feeling hateful, spiteful, vengeful, as you can tell from my tone here.)
Here are some examples:
Which one is correct, dimana or di mana? Kedua or ke dua? 1960an or 1060-an? Mahluk or makhluk? Apapun or apa pun? Bagaimanapun or bagaimana pun?
Did you know that the relative clause with dimana/di mana does not exist in BI? This construction gave me a heck of a headache when I edited the texts.
And then there is a whole bunch of exceptions, such as: mukjizat, but kemujizatan. Where did ‘k’ go? Menyejajarkan, but penjajaran, not penyejajaran. Why??? Mengontrol (‘k’ disapearred), but mengklasifikasikan (‘k’ is kept). ???
There are also the choice between ‘s’ and ‘k’ endings: organis/organik, neurotis/neurotik, somatis/somatik.
My goodness, if there were such a thing as TOIL (Test of Indonesian Language), which I think there is, I don’t know how much I would score. That’s why I’m searching for the holy book of Indonesian grammar: Tata Bahasa Baku Bahasa Indonesia. I found a book here by one of BI expert (Chaer), but it costs about four times the price in Indo, so I refused to buy it. I’ve just borrowed a book from the library: Indonesian Reference Grammar, by James Neil Sneddon, and he’s not even Indonesian! So far, I’m up to Chapter 1, and I might as well be learning Martian grammar. I understand the examples, but the rules are completely alien to me (not Mr. Sneddon’s fault, I’m just completely ignorant). So, hat’s up to all the BI experts out there, native and non-native speakers. I hope you will write more BI grammar books, so I could buy a cheaper one.