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Old 25th June 2005, 03:45 AM   #15
marto suwignyo
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Join Date: Jan 2005
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The variation in names of things from place to place in Java is very confusing sometimes, this was precisely what I was trying to clarify with my questions to Kiai Carita. I really only know Java,and not even all of that, but only where I and my wife have lived, but I imagine you could find a similar situation in other parts of South East Asia.
The chopper shown on P.34 of van Zonneveld`s book does have similar handle to the golok you have shown, but these choppers have entirely different blades to the type of blade on your example. In fact, when I saw that picture in the book it surprised me that it was called a bendho in West Java. van Zonneveld worked from old sources, and maybe at the time the books he worked from were published the names he gives for things in his book were correct, but there are quite a lot of things in the van Zonneveld book where the names now used are different from the names given in the book. Its not that Albert van Zonneveld made a mistake, its just that the times have changed, or the thing is known as something else in a different place, or even that the original author that van Zonneveld drew on was misinformed.
Kiai Carita took the correct approach when he said "in my village it is called such and such". In another village twenty kilometers down the road it might be called something else entirely, which to me means that if we want to give names to things we need to qualify the name by saying:- in this place, at this time, this article is known as a whatever.
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