Article

Malay plant names

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Malay plant names

H. N. Ridley published “Malay Plant Names” in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1897, providing an extensive alphabetical glossary correlating Malay vernacular names of plants with their scientific determinations for the Malay Peninsula. The work arose from Ridley’s observation that existing dictionaries and vocabularies—those of Marsden, Favre, and particularly Filet—contained numerous incorrect, Sumatran, or Javanese entries that did not reflect actual Peninsular usage, and that the native names of economic plants (drugs, timbers, fruits) urgently required accurate botanical identification (pp. 31–32).

Summary

The article is structured as a continuous A-to-Y alphabetical list of Malay plant names, each entry giving the vernacular term (with dialectal variants and regional qualifiers such as Johor, Pahang, Malacca, or Singapore), the Latin binomial, the family name in parentheses, and a brief note on habitat, uses, or etymology. Ridley draws on multiple source traditions: Jack’s Malayan Miscellanies (1820–22) for Penang names, Maingay’s manuscripts at Kew (published in the Kew Bulletin, 1890), Favre’s and Clifford’s dictionaries, and his own field observations across the Straits Settlements and Native States. He explicitly excludes Persian and Hindu loan-words for plants not occurring locally, omits most Javanese terms for cultivated plants, and includes a small number of Sakai words sourced from Professor Vaughan-Stevens (pp. 31–33).

A substantial portion of the introductory discussion is devoted to explaining the logic and problems of Malay plant nomenclature itself. Ridley notes that most plants carry multiple names due to dialectal variation (e.g., Bachang, Machang, Hembachang, Membachang for the horse-mango), that a single name may be applied to unrelated taxa sharing a timber character (as with Resak, covering a Shorea, an oak, and unidentified plants), and that names may shift according to which property of the plant is in view (Gelenggang, Cassia alata, also called Daun Kurap—“leaf for the cure of the disease Kurap”) (p. 33). He then decodes a set of recurring semantic qualifiers: jantan (male, indicating less conspicuous fruit), betina (female), gajah (large), tikus/tupai (small), hantu (false), hutan (wild), and antan (false), which he argues function as a kind of grammatical apparatus within the naming system (p. 34).

Ridley is candid about the list’s incompleteness: many names from the interior Native States were unobtainable, a number of plants for which he had native names remained botanically unidentified or undescribed, and many timber trees and rattans were known only by trade-product names that could not be reliably matched to the living tree (p. 32). He closes the introduction by observing that some names—nyur (coconut), nanas (pineapple), nona (custard apple)—evidently travelled with the plants from distant origins and might illuminate their dispersal history, while others reference obvious morphological or pharmacological properties (p. 34).

Key Findings

  • The glossary spans approximately 252 pages (pp. 31–283) and contains well over two thousand distinct Malay plant names with scientific determinations, covering trees, climbers, herbs, palms, ferns, orchids, fungi, and seaweeds.
  • Ridley identifies the etymological source of numerous place-names in the Peninsula as plant names: Malacca (from laka-laka, Phyllanthus), Pekan, Setul, Penang, Changi, Cape Rumenia, Tanjong Ru, and Gunong Pulai (p. 31).
  • The entry for gambir (Uncaria gambir) includes a philological correction: the product was originally called Kate Krambu (“scented cutch”) in Tamil, modified by Malays into Gatta Gambir, and the word getah in “getah gambir” is an error for gatta, a form of kate (p. 91).
  • The entry for baru (Hibiscus tiliaceus) records cognates across Polynesia and Madagascar—fau/vau in Polynesia, varu/baru in Malagasy—citing Guppy’s Polynesian Plant Names (p. 49).
  • The entry for bintangor (Calophyllum spp.) similarly lists connected forms: fetau (Samoa), vetau (Fiji), betau (Macassar), viritanina (Malagasy) (p. 59).
  • A brief Addenda (p. 282) supplies eleven additional names (including balau, identified as Parinarium oblongifolium), and a Corrigenda (p. 283) lists twenty-three typographical emendations across the text.

Conclusion

Ridley presents the work explicitly as a preliminary compilation, to be “considerably augmented as our knowledge of things Malayan increases” (p. 34). Its lasting value lies in the systematic pairing of living Peninsular Malay usage with botanical taxonomy, the decoding of recurring semantic morphemes in the naming system, and the demonstration that earlier European dictionaries had drawn heavily on Sumatran and Javanese sources without verifying their applicability to the Peninsula.

Context

  • Ridley was at this period the Director of the Singapore Botanic Gardens and the principal botanical authority for the Straits Settlements; the article reflects his direct field knowledge across Penang, Malacca, Singapore, Johor, Pahang, Perak, Selangor, and Province Wellesley, supplemented by named informants (Jack, Maingay, Vaughan-Stevens, Wray, Skeat).
  • The primary archival and printed sources consulted are: Maingay’s manuscripts (Kew), Jack’s Malayan Miscellanies (reprinted in MBRAS Miscellaneous Papers, Ser. II, Vol. II, pp. 209–295), Favre’s dictionary, Clifford’s dictionary, Filet’s Plantkundige Woordenboek, Rumph’s Herbarium Amboinense, and the Kew Bulletin (1890).

References