Thank you for your further comments Gustav.
Yes, I made some off the cuff comments based on a more than forty year old memory and some casual remarks by an employee of the Cirebon kraton, I also took the easy route and ran a name that had been phrased in Old Javanese past a native speaker of Modern Sundanese.
Maybe I should have spent some time delving into dictionaries and various publications, but I did not, I wrote from memory, I wrote in the moment.
Maybe I should have done some Google searches, I'm sure there is plenty of info about this matter to be found on-line, but I'm not all that interested in old carriages, and I do not have time to spend on endless unverified Google generated information.
My comments were sloppy, and probably indicate my level of interest in this matter.
I agree with your ID of the carriage in question and I do not oppose your dating.
You have given us Jessup as a reference, and I acknowledge that I misunderstood Jessup's bracketed (barong) following the Old Javanese word for a bear, "berwang". Jessup was simply giving us a variation in spelling of the same word, one that she probably drew from Zoetmulder, and one which reflects the pronunciation, or more probably, transliteration of the Javanese use of the Malay "beruang".
That Malay "beruang" is used in a number of languages across the Peninsula & Achipelago. Interestingly Raffles spells the Malay rendition of the word as "bruwang", which is the Modern Javanese and Balinese variation of the Old Javanese "barwang" and its alternative transliteration of "barong".
However, you have now introduced a giant into our conversation.
P.J. Zoetmulder together with his Old Javanese Dictionary.
We do not really dare to argue with Mr. Zoetmulder, we place his dictionary on a similar level to the Bible. Nobody but a fool argues with religious beliefs.
But, and this is a very weighty "but", once we introduce Zoetmulder into a discussion things start to get serious and any further discussion needs to involve a number of languages other than just Old Javanese and Modern Javanese. This further discussion probably needs an in depth understanding of the vagaries & variations in pronunciation of Modern Javanese also.
Some years ago I made some notes on the Singo Barong in preparation for the writing of a paper. Like a lot of things I do, that paper was shelved. I tend to lose interest in publication of things once I have satisfied my own curiosity, so the paper never got written, but I do still have the notes. Part of those notes deals with the formulation of the name "singo barong". To put all of that into this Forum cannot be justified, but I will make a suggestion that any interested parties might like to follow if they do wish to gain some understanding of the name "Singhabarwang".
My suggestion is this:- carry out research upon the progression of the Modern Javanese word "singo/singa" from its Sanscrit roots through Kawi & Old Javanese into Modern Javanese, then look at the various transliterations and translations of the Modern Malay word "beruang" that have produced the variations of this word in a number of Archipelago languages.
Bear in mind that transliteration can follow an established convention, and sometimes no established convention at all, and that words taken from speech can be expressed in Roman text according to the way in which they are heard by the listener.
I believe you would enjoy this journey Gustav, but it will use a fair bit of time to complete it, if indeed it can be completed, I feel that I probably have a little further distance to travel before I am completely satisfied.
|