Thank you David.
Yes, Woolley lists the term,and I take Skeat to be an unimpeachable source, but I cannot find the word "tikor" as Malay word. Further, the Woolley entry does not make sense to me for a number of reasons that I will not go into here.
The word "tikor" is found in a number of on-line dictionaries with the meaning of "east indian arrowroot plant", as well as some other irrelevant meanings.
The use of names of plants and flowers is quite common in keris terminology, and the area where this keris comes from is part of the East Indies. I suspect that the original use of the term as associated with keris had this relationship, but by Skeat's time it had acquired another meaning, by our time, another meaning again.
These are possibilities, but there is another possibility, and that is that confusion surrounds the term, so that perhaps it means different things to different people; this is not at all uncommon in matters to do with keris.
Whenever I find a term associated with keris, that I have not previously encountered, I try to find out what it means, and where it comes from.
If there is an Old Javanese association, consideration can be given to associating the keris itself to the time when that language was in use.
If the association points to Modern Javanese, or to Indonesian, or to Malay, or to some other language, that can assist with identification of origin in both time and place, and in the case of Bahasa Indonesia, with authenticity, for example, if we find an Indonesian term applied to a Javanese or Balinese keris, we need to question just how accurate that term is.
Language can act as a signpost. Sometimes the signpost might get twisted and you finish up nowhere, but it is always worth investigation.
|