Jens, no, I have not seen this book.
Fernando, yes, by the 16th century the form of the modern keris was well established. I have examined and photographed a lot of the very earliest keris to enter Europe, and most of these keris are indistinguishable in style from much later keris.
The problem with naming comes from references in old literature.
The Portugese visitors would have been using Malay, which was and still is, the trade lingua franca of SE Asia. Malay is basically the same as Bahasa Indonesia.
However, the indigenous people of Jawa communicated in Javanese, which at that time was still Old Javanese, not Modern Javanese.
Modern Javanese, beginning about the first half of the 17th century began its development to being a strongly hierarchically structured language with multiple levels, in some applications up to at least 11 levels, although in common usage only two or three levels are consistently used. This development seems to have begun under the Central Javanese rulers of Mataram.
In Old Javanese it seems that although the language used hierarchical levels, these were not nearly so developed as they became in Modern Javanese.
So, when we read something like the Nawanatya, composed to be read in the Majapahit court, we really do have problems in understanding exactly what weapons were being used in certain situations, according to our 20th-21st century understandings.
For instance, the text:"--- a gilded steel keris---" actually reads "--- twek melela hinemasan---", "twek" is "tewek", so tewek gets translated as "keris", because it seems logical to translate it as this, but we do not really know if this is correct.
I am not a linguist, but it seems that the problems of understanding that I have in this respect were also experienced by some of the greatest Javanologists and linguists of the 19th-20th centuries.
If we go back to Chinese sources there is well known passage from the Ying-yai Sheng-lan (1416), where the king carries a couple of short daggers called pu-lak. Invariably pu-lak gets translated as "keris", but again, the Chinese would have been communicating in Malay, and probably used a corrupted word picked up from an earlier Malay contact. But we're happy to believe they were talking about keris, because it seems logical that they were.
Believe me Fernando, the deeper you get into the investigation and analysis of keris history and development, the more complex and confusing it becomes.
I may be incorrect, but I believe that any deep research into the artifacts of other foreign cultures will provide similar problems.
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