Sydney Parkinson's Savu list

[Waruno Mahdi]

Today I at last got an opportunity to drop by at the rare-editions
section of the State Library.
First the good news:
according to the catalogue (also online one), the library had one
each of the 1771 and the 1773 editions of Parkinson's journal,
as well as one of a 1772 German edition.
The bad news:
all three are "war losses", i.e. they're not there anymore, not
even as microfilm copy.
But I'll probably be able to gain access to the 1773 edition in
some 5-6 weeks time.

Meanwhile I've downloaded greater parts of the online-reprint at
soutseas.nla.gov.au/journals/parkinson/

The f-for-long-s missprint is not the only systematic error,
there also is very frequent l (lowercase-L) for t (lowercase-T).
Both errors also occur in the English text -- I mean not just in
the English glosses, but also in the main text.

I agree too, that that "Sumatra" list is indeed Chinese as Ross Clark
inferred. Xiamen (formerly known as Amoy) is also referred to as
South Fujian (old spelling: S. Fukien or Fookien), and is a major
source of Chinese loanwords in Jakarta Malay (Betawi). There had
already been a large Chinese community in Jakarta before English and
Dutch "factories" or later the fort Batavia was set up there.

I've recognized a couple of more words of the list, but none of the
critical words that really interested me for a possible local Chinese
dialect of a settlement in Sumatra (that was the reason for my first
interest in the list) are amongst the items. None of the 17th-century
authors I worked through ever confused locally settled Chinese with
indigenous people, and I don't suppose Parkinson did that either,
so one should probably credit the confusion to the editors. It is
indeed quite incredible, to what extent editors in those days could
get things confused. One author explains quite explicitly in the main
text, that the jackfruit and the champedak are two different, even if
similar and closely related fruit (trees), but the editor (his own
brother) copies the image of a branch with two champedaks from
Bontius, and redesigns it into a plant growing out of the ground,
that he labels "a jackfruit tree" (in a further publication, a mirror
image of this latter is presented as a branch with "durians").

The "Low Malay" of Batavia list is very interesting for several
reasons (though unfortunately not a single example of a form with
suffix -an, -in, or -i). It already has gooa 'me' and loo 'you',
also cassee gooa 'give me'. But the recorded list is not uniform,
and apparently reflects the speech of a number of informants of
various origin (partly from East Indonesia): one informant velarized
final nasals, another dropped final consonants, another again had a
mid-high front vowel <e-acute> in place of schwa, etc. Also, besides
montega 'butter' and caidjoo 'cheese' they already knew curree 'a high-
seasoned soup', nyum-nyum.

The Malagasy (Madagascar) list is relatively correct (apart from few
interpolations), but not much more than one page long. Only the very
beginning of the second page (p.243 of the online version) is still
Malagasy, the rest is Malay with only very few deviant glosses (p. 243:
Corro corro 'A Java Proe' is surely kora-kora 'a Moluccan double-
outrigger war galley'; p. 244: Soondal 'A lie' is actually 'a
prostitute' -- umm, this is not a "family mailing-list", is it?).

I wasn't long enough at the library to consult the good Malayalam
dictionary they have there. But I wouldn't be too surprized about
Parkinson (or more probably the editors) confusing it with Malay.
Such confusions were quite normal in travel accounts of the 17th -
18th centuries. In one 17th-century text, "Malayan" was reinterpreted
into "Malabarese", apparently by the typesetter. A contemporaneous
Latin encyclopaedia-forerunner had an entry for _Malaei_ (with ae-
ligature) glossed as 'a population in cis-gangetic India on the
Coromandel coast towards the Malabar mountains'.

One must also bear in mind that the Portuguese who had been there
since almost a century earlier than Dutch and English often acted
as transmitters of local (also Malayalam and other Indic) items of
culture, custom, and language. One author stated that _jacca_ was
"the heathen word" for jackfruit (it was the Portuguese rendering
of Malayalam _chakka_ 'jackfruit').
Another one thought that arrack was 'a kind of Portuguese wine'.
BTW, Parkinson's Batavia-Malay Samshoo 'A particular sort of cold liquor'
(on p. 232) is Sino-Malay for 'arrack', mod. Indonesian _samsu_.

OK, this is getting much too long, and I still have other things to do.

Aloha, Waruno
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