Tilang Kamerau

[A. G. Maisey]

I know of three usages for the word "kemarau".

1) to be without money, to be broke; in my experience this is not a common usage

2) dry, when talking about something that was wet, but is now dry, such as the bottom of a boat when it was previously covered with water

3) dry, when applied to the weather, commonly a season, when it becomes "musim kemarau", but it can also be applied to a dry spell occurring at a time other than the dry season.

I have never once encountered its use to refer to "bright" weather, in fact, the dry season in SE Asia is very, very far from being "nice". The coming of the monsoon is something that is welcomed, not its disappearance.

It is true that the way in which a word is understood can change, but for the word "kemarau" to have been understood as "bright" seems to me to be improbable. Still, anything is possible.

One further note on this matter.

The standard reference for Classical Malay, ie, the Malay used in the old literary works, is Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary.

Wilkinson lists "kemarau" as:- "a drought, a period of continuous absence of rain", his reference is the Hikayat Abdullah

[Mytribalworld]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

I know of three usages for the word "kemarau".

1) to be without money, to be broke; in my experience this is not a common usage

2) dry, when talking about something that was wet, but is now dry, such as the bottom of a boat when it was previously covered with water

3) dry, when applied to the weather, commonly a season, when it becomes "musim kemarau", but it can also be applied to a dry spell occurring at a time other than the dry season.

I have never once encountered its use to refer to "bright" weather, in fact, the dry season in SE Asia is very, very far from being "nice". The coming of the monsoon is something that is welcomed, not its disappearance.

It is true that the way in which a word is understood can change, but for the word "kemarau" to have been understood as "bright" seems to me to be improbable. Still, anything is possible.

One further note on this matter.

The standard reference for Classical Malay, ie, the Malay used in the old literary works, is Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary.

Wilkinson lists "kemarau" as:- "a drought, a period of continuous absence of rain", his reference is the Hikayat Abdullah

yep, I understand that only Malay- English translations are taken serious
anyway, below the Malay- Dutch translation ( . its from 1847 , the Wilkinson is from 60 years later, I don't know if that could make a difference.....

[A. G. Maisey]

Wilkinson was not working from current usage, but from literary sources and scholarly input. His dictionary is relevant to Classical Malay, rather than Market Malay. Of course many words are used in both forms of the language, but Wilkinson is still the dictionary text for studies of Classical Malay. He drew on sources that in fact pre-dated the 1847 word list.

More than a few of these word lists seem to have been produced, the ones I've seen have been mostly Javanese, but quality and accuracy of many of them does sometimes raise some questions.

Both "helder" and "fraai" appear to have multiple meanings, dependent upon context, I have no understanding of Dutch at all, but I've had a look at a couple of dictionaries, and this seems to be the case. The usage of "fine" (fraai) appears to refer to a measure of quality, rather than in the context of weather. To my mind, this makes the word list translation even more worthy of question.

It did not occur to me previously, but "tilang" also appears in Classical Malay, not as "tilang", but as "tilan" = "a small river fish like an eel"

[Mytribalworld]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

Wilkinson was not working from current usage, but from literary sources and scholarly input. His dictionary is relevant to Classical Malay, rather than Market Malay. Of course many words are used in both forms of the language, but Wilkinson is still the dictionary text for studies of Classical Malay. He drew on sources that in fact pre-dated the 1847 word list.

More than a few of these word lists seem to have been produced, the ones I've seen have been mostly Javanese, but quality and accuracy of many of them does sometimes raise some questions.

Both "helder" and "fraai" appear to have multiple meanings, dependent upon context, I have no understanding of Dutch at all, but I've had a look at a couple of dictionaries, and this seems to be the case. The usage of "fine" (fraai) appears to refer to a measure of quality, rather than in the context of weather. To my mind, this makes the word list translation even more worthy of question.

It did not occur to me previously, but "tilang" also appears in Classical Malay, not as "tilang", but as "tilan" = "a small river fish like an eel"

As text is describing a sword it is somewhat more plausible that "tilang" stands for "Ilang" the common dayak word for his sword.

[A. G. Maisey]

Yes, I agree, I did consider raising the possibility of "ilang", but I do not know of a pronunciation of 'ilang' that uses a 'T' sound in front of the ilang, whereas an 'n' at the end of a word is sometimes given a 'g' sound, this is particularly common in Old Javanese, it is not exactly represented as a 'g', but when the Old Javanese word has come into Modern Javanese, the OJ "N" sometimes gains a MJ "G". I thought a similar thing might have applied with Malay.

But having said that I do not know of such a pronunciation, doesn't mean very much in this context, because my knowledge is pretty much limited to Jawa/Bali/Madura. Pronunciations of all words in these languages can and do vary all over the place, even today, people will vary a pronunciation simply to make the words sound better. In Jawa, people consider that they own the words that they use, and provided the other party understands, or appears to understand what is being said, they are not too particular with precise pronunciations. A similar attitude could apply in other areas also.

If there is only the one mention 'tilang' in old sources, it is possible that the original information was misunderstood, possibly because of imperfect knowledge of Malay on the part of the original information gatherer, or perhaps because of the sentence structure that the information was given in.

On the other hand, the fish concerned could, with a stretch of the imagination, vaguely resemble the particular weapon under discussion:- Macrognathus maculatus.

[Royston]

Arjan, I had not realised that Banks was quoting Schelford. How accurate was he ? As Alan says, did he hear it wrong or misunderstand what he heard ? One reference is not much to go on is it ?
Roy

[Mytribalworld]

Originally Posted by Royston

Arjan, I had not realised that Banks was quoting Schelford. How accurate was he ? As Alan says, did he hear it wrong or misunderstand what he heard ? One reference is not much to go on is it ?
Roy

Hi Roy,

both articles are certainly worth to read and contain worth full information but good information was sometimes scarves and so the writer(s) had to relay on one single source. Than you can easily makes mistakes.
Schelford was writing in 1901 while Banks wrote his article about 30 years later and between the lines in the Banks article you can see that. Some information isn't correct but otherwise the subject of the blade shapes ( usong) is very useful. Heppel reviewed these articles quite recent and also that article give some good info but also Heppell on his turn isn't perfect and there are also some mistakes in it. But all with all respect for all 3.

About mistakes, I'will try to add the pictures of the TK. And then we see that or the description is wrong, or the tag is wrong or.........