Sydney Parkinson's Sumatra list

[Richard Parker]

I would like to thank all who added some parts of their immense amount of knowledge, (and follow-uppable clues) to my original post on Sydney Parkinson's Savu wordlist.
   
  I would only take exception (tongue-in-cheek) to Roger Mills, who said:
  "Hmm, one would think that even in the 1770's the average educated Englishman 
traveling around the orient could tell the difference between Chinese and Malay"
   
  I consider myself an "average educated Englishman" (public school - 1960s - shared 90 bed dormitory with a couple of Siamese - nothing much more on languages), and I've travelled a bit about the Orient, but I still didn't know that the difference was Chinese.
   
  (Don't forget that Sydney Parkinson never travelled around the Orient - he came from the other way round).
   
  If Sydney Parkinson got all his information about Malayalam in SE India, numbers in Gambia, the language of Madagascar, numbers in Ceram, and a sort of Chinese lingua franca in Sumatra, during a couple of months in the bazaars of Batavia, then he was the sort of linguistic explorer who set a very high standard, for at least the next 200 years, that modern explorers should aspire to
   
  regards
   
  Richard Parker
Siargao Island, The Philippines. 
  My website at www.coconutstudio.com is about the island and its people,  coastal early humans, fishing, coconuts, bananas and whatever took my fancy at the time.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/an-lang/attachments/20070330/65bd607d/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
An-lang mailing list
An-lang at anu.edu.au
http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/an-lang