Balinese keris advice

[JeffS]

While a little prickly, I really do appreciate the divergent views and perspectives and the time taken to share them.

[A. G. Maisey]

Gustav, I know that you are an intelligent & cultured gentleman, and I do sometimes enjoy reading your opinions, however, the sort of discussion you & I are currently engaged in is the sort of discussion that I thought I had put behind me 60 or so years ago.

It is a discussion about trivialities.

In order to get paid for some of the work I engage in, I need to sometimes involve myself in this sort trivial exchange, but I am not being paid for my contributions to this forum, so I am not going to continue this discussion with you.

As I wrote:- no further discussion, so please just regard the following comments as remarks directed at the nearest wall:-

society in the fledgling country of Indonesia between the late 1930's and the fall of the Suharto regime deserves serious field study as well as reading the canned opinions of academics, if we wish to have some understanding of present day Indonesian society.

yes, pre-puputan Bali was not always ordered & settled, but conflicts between rulers were often settled by means other than extended physical conflict that deserves the name of "war".

yes, the keris had the nature of a weapon, it always did have, and it still has, but it was not, is not, a weapon of war, if it was not, is not a weapon of war, then it cannot be the weapon of a warrior.

soldiers and warriors are not necessarily one & the same thing, use of the word "warrior" automatically infers being engaged in war.

[A. G. Maisey]

I feel like I'm playing ping-pong here David, I have one bat in my right hand, one bat in my left, and as soon as I've returned a ball to Gustav, I need to return one to you.

Firstly, I do not use online dictionaries. The professional writing that I need to do often finishes up being used in a legal context, so I use hard copy, published dictionaries, I've got about two meters of bookshelves given over to dictionaries in several different languages, I need these as tools of trade, it can be pretty embarrassing to have a lawyer read out something that one has written, and then have that destroyed by some smart-ass barrister -- not one who makes coffee, but one who keeps people out of jail.

It is not open to each of us to independently determine what form or style of the English Language qualifies as "Standard English".

In another lifetime I taught English to new comers to Australia, I did this as a community service, it was not paying work, however, it did require a qualification to be permitted to undertake the work. One of my teachers who helped me to gain this qualification was a linguist who taught me and his other students, that the best example of "Standard English" was the form of English spoken by educated people living in a certain part of England, I think that part of England might have a location somewhere about 16 miles south west on London.

Well, he might have been right, or he might have been wrong, but what I have learnt about "Standard English", as that term is understood by linguists at the present time, is that "Standard English" can no longer be restricted to a single ironclad idea, thus "Standard English" can now be defined in a rather loose way that involves the application of varying measures in order to determine what is, or is not Standard English, in other words, Standard English is no longer something that is inflexible, but rather something that can flex providing that it adheres to a standard of intelligibility.

So I assume the idea of "Standard English" now means that as long as an educated person can understand the message of the spoken or written word that message has complied with a standard.

Thus, the standard with which Standard English must comply is a standard of intelligibility, and this standard cannot be not one of individual interpretation.

In respect of the version of the Oxford English Dictionary that I prefer to use for general writing. I use this because I was advised by a couple of lawyers that for courtroom usage this particular edition was perhaps the most practical. The complete Oxford runs to something like twenty odd volumes and is constantly being revised, for general usage it is not really practical to use, but the edition I use is apparently well suited for use in defensible legal argument. Moreover, it is only two volumes, and is always within arms length, so even though I began using it maybe 40 or 50 years ago, I now habitually use it whenever I have to look at a dictionary.

As to your semantics comment, yes, I do agree that I sometimes tend to consider exactly what a word means. I'm sorry, this is the way I was taught to think, it is the way I do think, if I write something I do want to be able to defend what I write. If I'm talking to somebody, I'm not as particular, particularly in a social setting, that is because when using the spoken word for communication we usually do have the opportunity to correct a misunderstanding, when we write we do not have that opportunity, thus when I write something I want that writing to say just what I want it to say.

Thus, if I want to refer to a person who is operating in a military capacity I might use the word "soldier", but if I wish to refer to a person who follows the occupation of war, I might use the word "warrior". These are different words with different meanings, and I have worked too long in an environment where use of the wrong word can get you hung.

True David, I did not address everything you wrote, but did I need to? Why recap on things that need no comment?

I agree with you completely in that all this discussion about warriors has derailed this thread. This sort of discussion, or if you wish debate, is something like the sort of discussion that undergraduates have in order to try to elevate themselves in the intellectual hierarchy.

All I really wanted to do was to cause people to think about why I wanted to disconnect Balinese keris from Balinese warriors, and the answer to that is pretty simple, it was because the keris was not, is not a weapon of war.

All the rest of this garble is just so much piss in the wind. (fifty years ago this would not have been accepted as Standard English, but by the current standard, I think it might be)

[Gustav]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

All I really wanted to do was to cause people to think about why I wanted to disconnect Balinese keris from Balinese warriors, and the answer to that is pretty simple, it was because the keris was not, is not a weapon of war.

Interestingly, Margaret Wiener in her much mentioned book writes:

"In precolonial Bali, all men owned at least one keris. This marked, in part, their status as warriors. Since all of a rulers adult male subjects were expected to fight in his wars, as intruments of royal agency, keris defined manhood in relation to a certain kind of political order."

And:

"The role keris played in constituting power hinged upon the fact that keris were first and foremost weapons, meant to be used against external enemies in war or internal ones in executions."

A book, always worth of rereading indeed.

[A. G. Maisey]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UneS2Uwc6xw

I respect MW enormously, since its publication I have recommended her work on Bali to perhaps every person who has asked me for guidance in their quest to understand the keris, however, I do not necessarily agree with every single word she wrote, nor with all of her published opinions.

I do not slavishly rely upon academic works to form my own opinions, and some of those opinions do vary from the opinions of academics.

As David has commented, this thread has become an exercise in semantics, but semantics is the study of meaning and truth, and the only way that any word can be understood as it should be understood is to analyse the meaning of that word and the truth encapsulated in that meaning. Ideally language should be used with precision, if it is not used with precision, that inadequately constructed language can generate misunderstanding and ignorance.

If what I have just written is true, then we need to consider this:-

1) A conflict or skirmish is not a war, neither is a confrontation or disagreement a war.

2) Engaging in a conflict or skirmish upon the orders of one's lord does not make a farmer either a warrior or a soldier.

3) Even fighting in a war does not make a farmer a warrior.

4) A weapon that might be used in a war does not make that weapon an implement that was intended for war, thus it is not a weapon of war.

5) The nature of a weapon can be many fold, and although that nature might include the letting of blood, in the case of the keris that letting of blood is not the only purpose of the keris.

The above is probably about as simple as I can make it, and yes, it is all about semantics:- the study of meaning and truth.

[Gustav]

Meaningless, can be deleted.

[A. G. Maisey]

Quite possibly so Gustav, but since I have been required for many years to be very conscious of the truth, meaning and logic of words, this is only to be expected.

Unlike many people I do not find the study of words to be onerous nor objectionable, I find it to be essential.

I was told many years ago by somebody, & I honestly forget who told me this, it might have been a high school teacher, that we cannot throw words around haphazardly we should regard words as being similar to bullets, not only in required accuracy but also in terminal effect.

A lot of the way I think and the way I act has come to me from things others have taught me, or maybe not necessarily "taught", but just their passing comments. I do try to follow some of this good advice, but I'm not always successful. I tend to be too verbose at times.

I recently had a little bit of writing published in (of all things) a book dealing with philosophy. I think it needed to be restricted to 5000 words, in any case, it needed to be of a defined length, & written in a defined style.

So I sat down and wrote the thing in a spare afternoon. It did not take long. But when I ran it through a word counter I had something like 20,000 words. The next 15 drafts were principally concerned with reducing that stack of garble that I had produced to an acceptable minimum.

I don't think I deliberately try to turn myself into a Gordian knot --- and I prefer to take this analogy as a compliment --- but I believe this sometimes might happen because I feel that I owe other people the common courtesy of trying my best to explain why I might take a certain position.

As to academia. I am not an academic, but I do have close friends and family who have been, & still are subjected to the harsh dictates of this segment of society. I have carried out paid work for a number of academics. Frankly I do feel sorry for academics and the world in which they live, but at the same time I am very appreciative of the contributions of some of these people to the bank of knowledge that they have made available to all of us.

EDIT

Too late Gustav, I had already read what you wrote & then deleted, and I thought it was, in its way, a beautiful piece of writing, perhaps one of the more perceptive things you have posted to this forum.