A Greek Word in 15th-Century Southeast Asia
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible.
I TALK QUITE A LOT about words of Indo-Malaysian origin in texts from elsewhere in the medieval world. These include the Chinese word for ‘brazilwood’, sūfāngmù (蘇枋木), borrowed from Malay sepang; the medieval Arabic word for ‘large ocean-going ship’, junk (جُنك), loaned from Old Javanese joṅ; and the Portuguese word for ‘blowgun’, zarabatana, which originated in the Malay word sumpitan and came to Europe after a tortuous relay across Asia and the Middle East.
What I don’t talk about much are wandering words from other parts of the medieval world in Indo-Malaysian languages. Aside from the many Sanskrit and occasional Persian and Chinese loans one might expect, there aren’t so many of these.
The Malay and Old Sundanese word for ‘paper’, kertas, is one. The term first appears in surviving texts of the fifteenth century. Like the Latin word charta and English charter, kertas comes the Greek word χάρτης (‘sheet of papyrus/paper’), possibly derived from an earlier Phoenician term. It came to Malay, and from there to Old Sundanese, by way of Arabic qirṭās (قرطاس), whose usual meaning seems to have been ‘rag paper’ (see e.g. Lambourn 2018:85, 95).
The word kertas appears in three notably early Southeast Asian texts:
1) the Old Sundanese narrative poem Bujangga Manik, probably written in the 1470s (and which I edited for my PhD thesis, so you’re probably sick of hearing about it by now);
2) the Classical Malay historical narrative Hikayat Raja Pasai, which dates to the first half of the fifteenth century but which survives in manuscripts of much later date; and
3) a Chinese phrasebook of Melaka Malay written in around 1492, a particularly early manuscript of which is London, SOAS Library, MS 48363, edited and translated by Edwards and Blagden in 1931.
In this post we’ll take a brief look at each of these references in turn. They’re all rather different. I should mention that there are other equally early uses of the word in Classical Malay texts, including the Hikayat Bayan Budiman, a story based on a Persian exemplar, but here I’m going to focus on one Malay example.
Paper Umbrellas
Bujangga Manik is the story of a young Sundanese ascetic who, after travelling around Java and Bali, deliberately shuffles off his mortal coil through spiritual discipline and becomes a god. The text was written in the 1470s, decades before the arrival of the Portuguese in Southeast Asia and before the Islamisation of Sunda in the sixteenth century, and it’s an extremely valuable document full of references to all sorts of perfumes and knick-knacks. It says a lot about the archipelago at a pivotal moment.
The word kertas appears in a description of an umbrella (payung) in line 1798 of my edition, on f.33v of the sole surviving manuscript. (The Bodleian digital copy labels it f.32r.) Each line is eight syllables in length and, while some such lines are complete sentences, this line is essentially just a noun phrase, appearing in a list of different kinds of umbrellas very near the end of the work as it currently stands. (The story ends mid-sentence, we can assume that there was more to it than survives today).
These are heavenly umbrellas, incidentally; by this point in the story, the protagonist, named Bujangga Manik, has made his way to heaven (kasorgaan) and seems to be being ushered through some sort of ethereal parade seated on a white yak, with lightning striking in the distance and white silk banners, compared to great egrets, fluttering in the wind. It may not have been the intended conclusion to the tale but it makes for a nice ending all the same.
Here’s what the relevant line — all eight syllables of it — says (Figure 1):
· payung ke(r)tas puñcak omas ·
‘gold-tipped paper umbrella(s)’
This isn’t paper as a writing surface but paper as a construction material for an umbrella or parasol. The significance of the line lies in the fact that ke(r)tas is one of the only confirmed Arabic loanwords in the text, and also the only one of Greek origin. Like the other Arabic loans in the story, kertas was almost certainly borrowed from Malay rather than directly from the Arabic.
Paper Portraits
In fact, the word kertas appears frequently in Classical Malay literature, usually with its original Arabic spelling (قرطاس). It isn’t particularly surprising to see Arabic and Persian loanwords, some with Greek origins, in Classical Malay texts, many of which are consciously based on Arabic and Persian models and written in an Arabic-derived script, but the appearance of the word kertas in some of these works is interesting nonetheless.
Most Classical Malay texts were composed or emended more recently than the fifteenth century, and there are almost no really old Classical Malay manuscripts — but the word kertas does appear in some notably early works, including some that are thought to have been preserved pretty well intact since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Hikayat Raja Pasai, perhaps the oldest surviving Malay historical text, is one of these. The Hikayat is now thought to have been written in the first half of the fifteenth century, between 1428 and 1448, although the oldest manuscript — London, Royal Asiatic Society Library, MS Raffles Malay №67 — was copied in Bogor, West Java, in 1815 (Figure 2 below).
Kertas appears at a pivotal point in the narrative. A princess of the Javanese kingdom of Majapahit, Gemerencang, is looking for a prince from another kingdom to marry. She asks a talented underling of hers, Tun Perpatih Jena, to venture out to all the neighbouring kingdoms to paint portaits of eligible noble men for her to look through so she can pick one to be her husband. To this end, Tun Perpatih Jena is sent out into the world with some nice stationery. The story of the Hikayat Raja Pasai (‘The Pasai Chronicle’, ‘Chronicle of the Kings of Pasai’) concerns the Sumatran kingdom of Pasai. It isn’t surprising, then, that Gemerencang ends up falling in love with the portrait of a prince of Pasai, thus precipitating the climactic showdown between Majapahit and Pasai that concludes the work.
Here is a snippet from the relevant section; the translation is by Russell Jones (2013:95):
Maka Tun Putri ini menyuruhkan hulubalangnya yang bernama Tun Perpatih Jena kepada segala negeri akan menuliskan rupa segala anak raja-raja yang pada segala negeri serta membawa kertas sepeti dan dakwat sekoci dan kalam seberkas.
‘[So] the princess [Gemerencang] ordered one of her chiefs, whose name was Tun Perpatih Jena, to visit different countries and to draw portraits of the princes he found in those countries. He [Tun Perpatih Jena] was to take with him a box of writing paper, a container of ink, and a bundle of reed pens.’
It is worth pointing out that all of the words for writing implements here are taken from Arabic — kertas ‘paper’, dakwat (دواة) ‘ink’, and kalam (قلم) ‘pen’. The latter is also a word of Greek derivation (from κάλαμος ‘reed’), incidentally, perhaps via Ge’ez.
The presence of such Arabic words isn’t particularly surprising, given that Islamic influence was increasing in Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century and given the Islamic inspiration of many/most Classical Malay works of this period. This is less unusual and thus, to my mind, less significant than the appearance of ke(r)tas in Bujangga Manik. Nevertheless, we can be quite sure that the use of kertas and kalam here is not the result of a later scribal interpolation as, even though the earliest surviving manuscript of the Hikayat Raja Pasai dates to 1815, it’s clear from other sources that these words were in use in Southeast Asia in the fifteenth century.
Paper in Transcription
Notably, the word kertas appears in a Chinese-Malay glossary compiled in around 1492 for the mid-Míng-dynasty Interpreters Institute (會通館). This glossary survives in later manuscripts — the aforementioned London, SOAS Library, MS 48363 was copied in 1547 — but no Portuguese loanwords feature in the text, and it appears to accurately preserve (a smidgen of) the Malay language as spoken in Melaka before the conquest.
I said that the word kertas appears in the glossary. Well, more accurately, a Chinese transcription of the word kertas appears in the glossary, as the equivalent of the Chinese word for paper, 紙 (item #252 in Edwards and Blagden 1931:734). The transcription is 各路剌答思, or gèlùládásī in pinyin. You may find a bit of a mouthful. It’s not an entirely inaccurate reproduction of the Malay pronunciation, though, particularly when you bear in mind the limitations of a syllabic script when it comes to recording words in foreign languages. The use of four or five Chinese characters to render a two- or three-syllable word is pretty typical; for comparison, note that the modern Mandarin name for ‘Las Vegas’ is 拉斯維加斯, pinyin Lāsīwéijiāsī.
(We can be fairly sure, by the way, that the pronunciation used in this work was an early form of Mandarin (or Guānhuà) and not a southern Chinese topolect. Everything produced by the Interpreters Institute was written in Guānhuà, which served as a sort of formal lingua franca from the Míng onwards.)
Incidentally, another word in the glossary also involves paper (or card): Item #257 seems to be a Guānhuà transcription of the Malay word ceki, the name of a popular card game in the Southeast Asian Chinese community. (I’ll talk about this topic in more detail next week.) Here, though, I’m less interested in the uses of paper in Southeast Asia than in the fact that this word, kertas, is a word of Greek origin. There aren’t that many words in early Southeast Asian texts whose origins may be found in official languages of the European Union (I’m being very careful with my phrasing here), and this word is interesting for that reason.
This is a Greek word — but it was not loaned directly from Greek. It more sort of wandered over, in classic Wanderwort fashion. In that sense it’s quite similar to words that were loaned into Greek from Malay and other Southeast Asian languages in the Middle Ages, like καφουρά ‘camphor’ and ζαροβοτανη ‘blowgun’/’small thin cannon’, which went through similar successions of languages on the way. And in that sense all of this is typical of the Middle Ages in Afro-Eurasia, wherein the long-distance movement of all kinds of things, including words, was more a relay than a sprint.
A. J. West — Leiden, 2022 (posted here 2024).
References
Edwards, E. D. and C. O. Blagden. 1931. A Chinese vocabulary of Malacca Malay words and phrases collected between AD 1403 and 1511 (?). Bulletin of the school of oriental studies. 6(3):715–749.
Jones, Russell. 2013. The Pasai chronicle. Kuala Lumpur: Institut Terjemahan & Buku Malaysia.
Lambourn, Elizabeth A. 2018. Abraham’s luggage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
