Where Does "Reboisasi" Come From?

This one goes for Andre

Just type reboisasi in Google (or Yahoo!, whichever you prefer) and get ready for thousands of results coming up. I myself found 75,000 from Google.co.id and 74,900 from Google.com, and all of them are Indonesian sites. Said earlier you wondered where the word comes from, right?

Simply by looking at the form it has, it's normal to guess this one is from English. Let's see, the suffix –isasi must be derived from –tion (altering a noun from a process), right? And the prefix re– must mean repetition, okay? So why not type reboisation now. How many will we get?

Only 62? Whoa, it can't be that then. Maybe we mistyped it. What about reboitation? Looks more English, yes?

Err... only 24? Can't be that too, then.

Geez. How come the stupid American and English people never heard of anything about “the process of restoring and recreating areas of woodlands or forest that once existed but were deforested”?

(The stupid was me. They call it reforestation there!)

Well, it's crystal clear that both reboisation and reboitation are only fictitious words made up by Indonesian. I bet you agree we Indonesian are real good at it, hahahah. And you know what... I silently typed reboisasion and found 22 pages indeed. All of them are from ITB Bandung. What a shame.

Anyway, back to our mission.

If not English, so where does reboisasi really come from? I am beginning to get scared now. I have heard about that word ever since I was in elementary school. I was trained to say it quickly with no-thinking whenever my teacher asked us about what we should do about our forests (you did the same, I believe). I must get it. I don't want to die before knowing where the hell we imported the word from :)

So I crossed my finger and checked for reforestation on Wikipedia. I was hoping I would see something helpful. As helpful as it can get, I came across this bottom-left box titled “in other language”. Oh yeah.

You know what happened when I ran the cursor over “Dutch”? I get to know that they call it aufforstung in Netherlands. And you know what happened when I ran the cursor over “French”?

I get to know that they call it... Eureka. Look what we've got here.

Well then, regarding the similarity and me being a dumb-ass, I'd say it's French. Reboisasi is derived from reboisement (don't bother to ask me how to pronounce it). Bois means wood. Apparently investment is not the only word we imported and treated bad. Reboisement too, from –ment become –isasi. But nah, I'm sure you're not surprised.

PS. I am now a bit suspicious we import that investasi word from them, too.

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1. Result for reboisasi on Google.co.id
2. Result for reboisasi on Google.com
3. Result for reboisation on Google.co.id
4. Result for reboitation on Google.co.id
5. Result for reboisasion on Google.co.id
6. Affixation on Wikipedia
7. List of English suffixes on Wikipedia
8. Reforestation on Wikipedia
9. Reboisement on Wikipedia
10. Investissement on Wikipedia
11. Bois on Wikipedia