Tilang Kamerau

[Mytribalworld]

Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey

Wilkinson was not working from current usage, but from literary sources and scholarly input. His dictionary is relevant to Classical Malay, rather than Market Malay. Of course many words are used in both forms of the language, but Wilkinson is still the dictionary text for studies of Classical Malay. He drew on sources that in fact pre-dated the 1847 word list.

More than a few of these word lists seem to have been produced, the ones I've seen have been mostly Javanese, but quality and accuracy of many of them does sometimes raise some questions.

Both "helder" and "fraai" appear to have multiple meanings, dependent upon context, I have no understanding of Dutch at all, but I've had a look at a couple of dictionaries, and this seems to be the case. The usage of "fine" (fraai) appears to refer to a measure of quality, rather than in the context of weather. To my mind, this makes the word list translation even more worthy of question.

It did not occur to me previously, but "tilang" also appears in Classical Malay, not as "tilang", but as "tilan" = "a small river fish like an eel"

As text is describing a sword it is somewhat more plausible that "tilang" stands for "Ilang" the common dayak word for his sword.