How to read a greneng

[Johan van Zyl]

Well, as a 71-year old, let me say to you, Alan: we're still young enough for very many years, and may those years be filled with further fulfilling labours. I have been a scholar all my life and am learning still. Looking at your very many threads and posts, I have come to view you as a teacher in the most honourable sense of the word, and I ask you to please continue teaching.

To show how right you are in encouraging members to read up incessantly in keris lore, I'd like to give an example of my own "research".

(Coincidentally, your Interpretation Part 4 is the very same paper I have been studying during the few days this thread has been running. I had judged it earlier to be most informative with this topic in mind.)

The seemingly irrelevant efforts I have been making by delving into all aspects of the keris (under your insistence, for which I thank you) has given me much food for thought. So I have discovered that the Indonesians (of which the greater part were Javanese) who were brought to this country during the sad time of the slave trade, helped in the development of Afrikaans, my mother tongue. In fact, in time, those Javanese and Bugis learned to speak Dutch, and they, together with the European colonists who came over, changed the Dutch into Afrikaans. The size of this contribution to the language, made by the Indonesians, was not evident during early studies, but today it is acknowledged. Today Afrikaans is the adopted (read: only) first language of not only people like myself (eleventh generation South African) but also thousands of people living here in the Western Cape Province, whose forebears came from Java, Sulawesi and the like.

I have read a lot of Shakespeare, and have seldom understood it in its correct context. Yet I have read it, talked about it, quoted from it, and taught it to my grandchildren. I will not withhold it from them because of their imperfect understanding of the Bard's life and times.

So I give you a wide smile of appreciation and ask you not to be withholding because of uncertainties in Keris lore, but please keep on teaching in this forum!

Johan