Tilang Kamerau

[Mytribalworld]

Originally Posted by Royston

At home and bored while recuperating from some form of " plague"
Reading through past posts and trying to match up some of my collection with some of yours. I.E " playing the name game "

Have re-read Banks article on Hoplology of Sarawak.

Due to the (dubious ?) miracle that is Facebook I recently made contact with an ex workmate who is now married and living in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah.
His wife, her friends and some of his workmates ( guys from Sabah, Sarawak and Brunei ) have been trying to find a meaning for " Tilang Kamerau" for me.

Too much success so far, there appears to be too many variants within the different languages and dialects of Borneo. None of them can agree with each other even to the extent of Sabah Ibans saying it is Sarawak Iban and vice versa.

Does anyone here know exactly which dialect the words are ?
Or even know the meaning.
Regards
Roy

Hi Roy,

As far as I know the only source who ever mentioned the name ' Tilang Kemarau ' was Schelford who described a sword of Batang Lupar origin which he donated to the Pitt Rivers museum. ( Heppell, two curators a classification of Borneo swords and some swords in the Sarawak museum collection) Banks followed the description of Schelford so if I understand correctly the whole naming of swords of the Tilang Kemarau type started with this one and only case. Maybe that was correctly described but its a quite narrow base.....


I just found and old Malay-Dutch translation for the word " Kamarau" what simply means " fraai"or "helder" Transl to English " fine" or " bright".
That seems to me a quite more plausible translation than " dry season" or is the word kamerau referring to the brightness of the sky when it means dry season ?

source translation : Tijdschrift voor Neerland's Indië jrg 9, 1847 (1e deel) [volgno 2]

regards,

Arjan