Another Arabic-Malay Glossary

December 2023

Aglaia Iankovskaia

 

This systematic Arabic-Malay vocabulary is a sibling of Leiden Or. 3231(8) addressed in Interlinear translation of the month #11: not only is it a copy of the same text, but also has the same provenance. Also titled al-Jadwal fī kalām al-‘Arab (‘A list in Arabic speech’), it is found in Leiden manuscript Or. 3233(2) between two other Arabic-Malay vocabularies arranged alphabetically (ff. 30-56). One of these latter vocabularies, Or. 3233(1), is the same with Or. 3231(6)—two of the three texts in Or. 3233, therefore, duplicate those in Or. 3231. Both manuscripts belong to the collection of Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk (1824–1894), who brought them from his travels in Sumatra in 1851–1856. However, only Or. 3233 contains notes by van der Tuuk’s hand in the margins.

Figure 1. al-Jadwal fī kalām al-‘Arab, Or. 3233(2), ff. 40v–41r, Leiden University Library.

The handwriting in this vocabulary is finer than in Or. 3231(8); unlike in the latter, Arabic words are not diacritisised, and the untitled faṣl (sections) are highlighted with red ink. Juxtaposing some of these sections reveals that the Arabic wordlists are identical to those in Or. 3231(8)—however, the spellings of words differ. Both vocabularies appear to contain considerable number of misspellings, which sometimes make Arabic words hardly recognisable. What is interesting is that these misspellings are distributed between the two manuscripts relatively equally: some words are spelled correctly in Or. 3233(2) and misspelled in Or. 3231(8), and vice versa. Indeed, the two versions of the vocabulary help a modern reader to decipher each other. Most of the misspellings appear to be of a graphical nature, e.g. letters of similar shapes are confused or dots misplaced, which apparently indicates that the manuscripts are not directly related and the wordlists in them have travelled different paths of corruption in the process of recopying. But it might have been not only recopying that contributed to this corruption.

For instance, in the section dealing with clothes and textiles, there appears a confusing word spelled as dāl-ḥā’-rā’-yā’-ḍād (in 3231(8)) or dāl-ḥā’-rā’-ṣād (in 3233(2)), which can be read as daḥrīḍ or possibly daḥriṣ (3233(2) provides no diacritics). Such a word does not seem to be found in dictionaries, but its interlinear Malay translation appears to give a clue to what it might have originally been. Below the line, this word is translated as suji baju (‘shirt embroidery’). There is an Arabic word for embroidery that could have sounded similarly to daḥriṣ to a non-native Arabic speaker, that is taṭrīz, as well as another word, takhrīm, that could have possibly transformed into daḥriṣ as a result of two stages of corruption, phonetical and graphical (the final mīm having been misinterpreted by a copyist as ṣād). If any of the two is the case, this seems to suggest that the history of reproduction of the text included both written and oral transmission, i.e. at different points in time it might have been copied from a manuscript and written down by dictation.

In the Arabic lines of the vocabulary, such possible traces of oral transmission still appear to be rather scarce. The majority of misspellings are those a copyist could produce due to inattention or unclear handwriting in the earlier manuscript, while the scribe’s own relatively fine hand suggests that the wordlist was copied without much haste from a written source—which seems to not be the case for the Malay translation. This translation is scribbled between the lines in a less accurate manner and might not have been copied at the same time with the Arabic text. Besides the sloppiness of the handwriting, there is another feature pointing to the different life paths of the Arabic and Malay parts of the vocabulary. The Malay translations of the Arabic words in the two manuscripts are largely identical, but not entirely, and the differences do not seem to result from recopying. For example, the Arabic word al-sundus (‘taffeta,’ thin silk textile) is translated in 3231(8) as kain sutra yang nipis (‘thin silk fabric’) and in 3233(2) as just kain (‘cloth, fabric’); and al-biṭānah (‘lining’) as lapis baju (‘shirt lining’) and luar baju (‘outer layer of a shirt’), respectively. Might these differences be due to a teacher’s reinterpretation in the classroom, or a student’s hastiness in writing the translations down?

Corrupted as it is, the Arabic wordlist in the vocabulary still appears to be a more stable part of the text than the Malay translations. The spelling differences between the two manuscripts seem to be not intentional, but rather result from the multiple stages of thorough but not flawless recopying by non-native Arabic speakers. The variety in translations, on the other hand, appears to be more voluntary, which might reflect the fluid character of interlinear translation and the role of an oral element in its transmission.