"He eats apples."
Translation:Dia makan apel.
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Dia refers to a person (He/She). Ia refers to non-human (Animals/Objects etc). To refer Dia as a person is considered rude.
In Standard Malay, dia is almost exclusively used as a pronoun for living beings while ia is mainly for non living things--although the latter can be used for both. In Standard Indonesian dia is synonymous with ia, but the latter is much less common, and ia is not used as a pronoun (we use noun+determiner instead).
In daily speech, ia is almost nonexistent.
Just curious, would ia be used in the situation where you refer to something as a she, for example a ship?
Yes in Standard Malay, but not in Standard Indonesian (I personally would use kapal ini/itu/tersebut 'this/that/said ship'). Both dia and ia are almost exclusively used for living things in Indonesian.
I looked this up on Wiktionary:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dia#Indonesian https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ia#Indonesian
It says that 'ia' is a genderless third person pronoun (he/she). I am interested in seeing how and when this is used...
If the sentence is "he eats apples", then usually indonesian doesn't specify "apel-apel", because "eats apples", 'eats' is already plural
In English, "eats" is simply the third person present tense indicative form of "to eat." It has nothing to do with the direct object being singular or plural. He eats an apple, he eats apples, etc. But as for the Indonesian, thanks for your response.
How do you distinguish masculine or feminine when using dia in a sentence?
