Ethnographic Arms & Armour - View Single Post

A. G. Maisey · 22nd October 2015, 09:17 PM

In my post #33 I spat the dummy.

I'd had enough. The whole tilang thing stands on shaky foundations and we could hypothesise, or worse still use a little bit of knowledge combined with some Wiki entries and create something entirely fictitious --- it has been done before.

But this thing has caught hold of my interest, and I have become annoyed by the fact that I cannot understand something that I should be able to understand.

So I think we can maybe continue to take a little bit of a poke at this question.

It seems this thing was collected by Robert Shelford. Shelford was a naturalist, not an ethnographer, not an anthropologist, and possibly his expertise in Malay was limited to pretty basic market Malay. It takes a lot of time to gain competence in a foreign language --- even the famed Raffles could only handle basic Malay, one of the reasons he never quite established satisfactory contact with the elites in Jawa.

Or maybe Shelford worked entirely through an interpreter. We don't know, but what we do know is that this name as it stands does not seem to fit into a Malay language pattern. But it should.

Malay is different to English in that it places the most important thing first in sentence, statement, or name, and the descriptor follows:- mobil kuning = yellow car.

Sometimes the principal name and the descriptor can be interchangeable:- jati gembol or gembol jati = both combinations mean the same thing:- burl teak.

So, logically our tilang kamaran should be a tilan fish + a descriptor.

Really, none of the suggestions that I, or anybody else have made really fits a standard Malay pattern. Yes, in names a bit of twisting can go on, and everything suggested might fit one way or another, but they're not perfect.

What we need is a word that will describe a fish, when that fish name is also the name of a sword.

Here are two more suggestions:-

kemerahan = from merah :- red

kemarahan = from marah :- anger

both these words, particularly "kemarahan" if spoken by a native speaker would sound like "kamaran" to somebody with very limited Malay. Don't forget that local pronunciations can play havoc with both vowel and consonant placement.

Maybe there are more words that will fit. However, I do most sincerely doubt that the original name recorded is an accurate representation of the name given to Shelford by his informant.

22nd October 2015, 09:17 PM	#35
A. G. Maisey Member Join Date: May 2006 Posts: 6,716	In my post #33 I spat the dummy. I'd had enough. The whole tilang thing stands on shaky foundations and we could hypothesise, or worse still use a little bit of knowledge combined with some Wiki entries and create something entirely fictitious --- it has been done before. But this thing has caught hold of my interest, and I have become annoyed by the fact that I cannot understand something that I should be able to understand. So I think we can maybe continue to take a little bit of a poke at this question. It seems this thing was collected by Robert Shelford. Shelford was a naturalist, not an ethnographer, not an anthropologist, and possibly his expertise in Malay was limited to pretty basic market Malay. It takes a lot of time to gain competence in a foreign language --- even the famed Raffles could only handle basic Malay, one of the reasons he never quite established satisfactory contact with the elites in Jawa. Or maybe Shelford worked entirely through an interpreter. We don't know, but what we do know is that this name as it stands does not seem to fit into a Malay language pattern. But it should. Malay is different to English in that it places the most important thing first in sentence, statement, or name, and the descriptor follows:- mobil kuning = yellow car. Sometimes the principal name and the descriptor can be interchangeable:- jati gembol or gembol jati = both combinations mean the same thing:- burl teak. So, logically our tilang kamaran should be a tilan fish + a descriptor. Really, none of the suggestions that I, or anybody else have made really fits a standard Malay pattern. Yes, in names a bit of twisting can go on, and everything suggested might fit one way or another, but they're not perfect. What we need is a word that will describe a fish, when that fish name is also the name of a sword. Here are two more suggestions:- kemerahan = from merah :- red kemarahan = from marah :- anger both these words, particularly "kemarahan" if spoken by a native speaker would sound like "kamaran" to somebody with very limited Malay. Don't forget that local pronunciations can play havoc with both vowel and consonant placement. Maybe there are more words that will fit. However, I do most sincerely doubt that the original name recorded is an accurate representation of the name given to Shelford by his informant.