Thread: New keris?
View Single Post
Old 31st August 2008, 09:58 AM   #17
Henk
Member
 
Henk's Avatar
 
Join Date: Dec 2004
Location: The Netherlands
Posts: 1,209
Default

I already thought so that this knowledge was gone for the greatest part, Alan. Still you speak about uwer and not about mendak. May i assume that uwer is balinese for mendak, or is an uwer a complete different object compared to the mendak?

About trying to give names to the parts of a keris or weapon. I completely agree with you. As a matter of fact I do remember I posted a chopper. In that discussion the object got about three different names. In this village it was called that, and in that village it was called that. And is it worth quarreling about the name of an object? Only when a sword is called a spear the mistake is definitely clear.

In an old Dutch book about keris you can find a few dhapur names, but the author says the same you said. Describe the keris in terms of their characteristics. I think we might better stick to that, although we humans wish to categorize things.
Henk is offline   Reply With Quote