name?

[Waruno Mahdi]

Laine Berman <laine.berman at ANU.EDU.AU> wrote:

> I have just been asked to assist a local museum to help identify the origin
> of a 1889 painting by Paul Serusier who was a Pont-Aven artist and friend
> of Gauguin.  The painting is of a person called Mai Chaipp who, according
> to the very limited information the museum has at this stage, may have been
> Javanese. Is anyone able to help identify the name 'Mai Chaipp' and wager
> to guess where s/he might be from?

As this was in France, the name would pronounce like English _may shape_,
I guess.
Javanese names are usually pretty long, and something as short as this
would have to be an abbreviated familiar form of a name. But the _sh_
militates against such an assumption, because even in the rather rare
instances of _sh_ (Indonesian old spelling _sj_, new _sy_) in names of
Javanese (typically names of Arabic origin), this is usually shifted
to _s_ in the familiar shorter forms.

If the person were a woman, the _May_ could represent _Mei_, a Chinese
name, but I don't think there are Chinese names in Java that begin with
_sh_ (_sy_).

Perhaps, the person wasn't Javanese after all, but from Indochina. The
name seems definitively not to be Vietnamese. Whether it could be
Khmer or Lao, or perhaps from some ethnic minority, I can't tell.

I'll CC this to Sealang-L list in case someone might recognize it
there.

Salam & Savatdee,   Waruno

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Waruno Mahdi                  tel:   +49 30 8413-5411
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