What is NOT a tumbuk lada for me one can see in the photos below. I call all knives in the photos below "sewar" even if at some point in space and time they might have been called tumbuk lada by somebody.
And I do this because I think, in our collectors' community, we should strive for precision, clarity and concision, and we should use a terminology that is precise, clear and concise. And in this case the ethnographically "correct" terms do not differentiate enough and create confusion as they are not specific and features related enough to be relevant.
So, for example, if we call "tumbuk lada" every Malay knife that has a somehow broader pommel, then the very use of the term "tumbuk lada" will become mostly useless as we won't know which "type of tumbuk lada" we are referring to.
That's why I believe that in order to be useful, clear and concise, the term "tumbuk lada" should be used only for the specific type of knives shown in the photos in the opening of the thread.
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