"Kamu kuat."
Translation:You are strong.
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More than likely. Indonesian has borrowed quite a bit from Arabic since it's a muslim-majority nation.
It could be the opposite, and Arabic language that borrowed from other language very often, here from an older language: Sanskrit.
For instance, the word "sugar" is from Arabic (سكر sakar), that's true, but this word is itself from Sanskrit शर्करा śarkarā.
The Indonesian could be directly from Sanskrit, because the country were first influenced by Asian religions, before being influenced by Islam. This Indonesian history, there's a past and a language before it adopted islam as its religion.
It's a common and easy mistakes to think that an Indonesian word is from Arabic, when the Arabic word is itself a loan word, and both languages, Indonesian an Arabic loaned a lot from Sanskrit. But it's also true that there's a lot of Arabic words in Indonesian (mostly related to religion and moral by the way).
It's not totally clear as some dictionaries gives "kuat" from Arabic (but not directly from Arabic, but via Persian language قوت (qovvat) (so maybe not a religious word in this case? ) , but other ones from Sanskrit उत्ताल. (I don't see the link between "kuat" and this word, but I don't know Sanskrit).
Other language derivated from Sanskrit also have this etymology, and they didn't get influenced by Islam, Hindi: क़ुव्वत (quvvat)and Gujarati કુવ્વત (kuvvat), કૌવત (kauvat), and Marathi कुवत (kuvat).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indic_loanwords_in_Indonesian
So the etymology is not 100% clear in my opinion and a bit contradictory. Unless someone could explain more.
I don't speak Hebrew or Aramaic for instance, if the languages has a similar root, it could prove definitely that it's really an Arabic root word originally.
And Indonesian has also some words from Dutch because colonialism (already appel, at this level of learning and dan even if the meaning is not the same).
2392
In this case, "kuat" may probably be a stative verb, meaning it's a verb that denotes a quality of being ("to be strong"), rather than an action. So, the copula "to be" isn't needed. As far as I know, there are lots of stative verbs in Indonsian, which in English would just be adjectives.
I gather no copula is used, at least not in informal speech. Is it used in more formal speech?
