A World of Words and Words for the World

edited by Ronit RICCI and Fadhli LUKMAN • 25.3 (2025) ISSN 0806-198X DOI 10.5617/jais.12772 ACROSS THE MUSLIM WORLD A Comparative Perspective Themed Section Contents FADHLI LUKMAN and RONIT RICCI Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 5 A.C.S. PEACOCK Medieval Eastern Turkish Interlinear Translation: Their Manuscripts, Audience, and Persian Background................................................................................... 19 AGLAIA IANKOVSKAIA A World of Words and Words for the World: Encyclopaedism and Language Learning in a 19th-century Arabic-Malay Vocabulary ...................................... 51 RAPHAEL MICHAELI Interlinear Translation in Textual Performance: The Usage of Swahili in Arabic Mawlid Readings from East Africa ................................................................... 73 FADHLI LUKMAN Surau Texts Translated: Translation in Form, Textual Analysis in Substance .................. 103 MIDORI KAWASHIMA Ingenuity Between the Lines: Interlinear Translation from Arabic to Malay to Vernacular in Mindanao ................................................................................................ 123 MUHAMMAD DLUHA LUTHFILLAH Not the Utawi You Think You Know: Some Preliminary Notes on Early Javanese Interlinear Translations ...................................................................................... 175 RONIT RICCI Interlinear Texts from Indonesia: Preliminary Thoughts on Their Study ......................... 197 Notes on Contributors ....................................................................................................... 221 Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 © Aglaia Iankovskaia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK ISSN 0806-198X DOI 10.5617/jais.12694 A World of Words and Words for the World: Encyclopaedism and Language Learning in a 19thcentury Arabic-Malay Vocabulary AGLAIA IANKOVSKAIA (SOAS, London)1 Abstract The article looks into two manuscripts containing copies of a thematic Arabic-Malay vocabulary titled alJadwal fī kalām al-ʿArab (A list in Arabic speech). Originating in mid-19th-century West Sumatra, the manuscripts are housed in the Leiden University Library with the numbers Or. 3231(8) and 3233(2) and belong to the collection of Dutch linguist Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk (1824–1894). The vocabulary features a list of Arabic words arranged in thematic sections and provided with Malay equivalents below the line. Starting with God’s names and words describing the natural world, it proceeds to sections dealing with human society and everyday life. The article discusses the encyclopaedic nature of such an arrangement and addresses the pedagogical functions of this thematic dictionary as a tool for teaching and learning Arabic as a foreign language in the Indonesian-Malay world. Juxtaposing two versions of the same text, it questions the modes of this text’s transmission and reasons for employing an interlinear model of translation in a dictionary. Considering the divergences between the two manuscripts as well as different misspellings they contain, the article argues that the interlinear Malay translations were transmitted separately from the Arabic wordlist. Keywords: Arabic-Malay lexicography, West Sumatra, dictionary, interlinear translation, Islamic education Introduction For centuries, bilingual dictionaries appear to have been an indispensable part of foreign language learning and textual translation. Some of the dictionaries listed words in alphabetical order or in order of appearance in a text (glossaries), serving as reference works for those reading and translating texts in a foreign language. Others, i.e., systematic dictionaries, or vocabularies, grouped words related to a certain field or theme and helped 1 This research was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (project: Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies, grant agreement no. 101001731) and by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 2009/19). I thank Prof. Ronit Ricci, Dr Fadhli Lukman, Dr Mulaika Hijjas, Prof. Pramono, Dr Marije Plomp, Dr Edward Weech, Dr Alexandra Kasatkina, and Annechien Ten Brinke for their insights, advice, and help with translation and accessing manuscripts. Aglaia Iankovskaia • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 52 learners to build and expand their vocabulary. Surprisingly, not too long ago dictionaries of the second type were not as widely used and available as one might expect—at least, in the Indonesian-Malay world where Islam spread starting from the 13th century and Arabic was studied as the language of the Qur’an and a key to religious sciences. This article seeks to discuss a thematic Arabic-to-Malay vocabulary found in two copies from Sumatra: Leiden Or. 3231(8) and 3233(2), both belonging to the collection of Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk (1824–1894), the well-known Dutch linguist and Bible translator. Dating back to the middle of the 19th century, they represent a type of lexicographical work that is rarely found in Malay manuscript collections. The history of Arabic-Malay lexicography has been approached by Michael Laffan2 and Nico Kaptein,3 the former also touching upon the manuscripts addressed in this article. The manuscripts, i.e., Leiden Or. 3231 and 3233, are collective volumes containing several dictionaries of different types, among them alphabetical, systematic, and specialized ones. Titled al-Jadwal fī kalām al-ʿArab (A list in Arabic speech, or List of Arabic words), the dictionary to be discussed here is of the second type, as it is arranged in thematic sections, such as spices, animals, and body parts. The words kitāb al-lugha (dictionary, or literally language book) preceding the title are not part of it but rather indicate the type or genre of the book.4 Remaining true to the title, the dictionary is indeed a list—that of Arabic words, which are provided with Malay equivalents below the line. In the Greco-Roman world, such lists of words arranged by semantic fields were known as onomastica.5 In the Arabic Middle East, the genre also gained currency; John Haywood defines it as “general classified vocabulary,” a type of lexicographical work that consisted of words classified by subject-matter under broad headings, or sometimes according to wordforms (in some cases both methods were mixed).6 However, in the Arabic-speaking world such vocabularies were monolingual. Bilingual Arabic-to-vernacular dictionaries came into play with the expansion of Islam to Persianand Turkic-speaking regions, where the word lûġat, lüġat, or lughat (derived from the Arabic al-lugha, “language”) was used to designate a dictionary.7 In the same meaning, that is of a dictionary or vocabulary, (kitāb) lughat appears to have settled in the Malay language.8 Another feature making the Arabic-Malay 2 Michael Laffan, “New Charts for the Arabic Ocean: Dictionaries as Indicators of Changing Times,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 159, no. 2–3 (2003): 351–387. 3 Nico J.G. Kaptein, “Some Early Contributions to Arabic-Malay Lexicography: Sayyid ‘Uthmān of Batavia (1822–1913) as a Lexicographer,” in Malay Images, ed. Haji Omar A. (UPSI, 2005), 120–142. 4 Jan Just Witkam, Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Library of the University of Leiden, vol. 4 (Ter Lugt Press, 2007), 76. 5 Rolando Ferri, “The Greco-Roman World,” in The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 84, 87–88. 6 John A. Haywood, Arabic Lexicography (Brill, 1960), 4, 111–114. 7 Marek Stachowski, “The Turkic Languages and Persian to c. 1700,” in The Cambridge World History of Lexicography (Cambridge University Press, 2019), 223. 8 Richard J. Wilkinson, A Malay-English Dictionary (Kelly and Walsh, 1901), 599. A World of Words and Words for the World • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 53 vocabulary from Van der Tuuk’s collection part of a wider tradition is that the words in it are written as a continuous text, which was also typical of Persian wordlists.9 One more wider tradition that this vocabulary appears to be part of is that of interlinear translation from Arabic into Malay or other languages of the Islamic Indonesian-Malay world. Such translations, some of them very literal and some rather interpretative, often accompany Arabic texts found in manuscripts from the region and even in later printed editions of such texts (for scholarship on the matter see works by Azyumardi Azra, Ronit Ricci, and Arif Maftuhin).10 Along with marginal annotations and commentaries, they act as paratextual elements—not being part of the main text, translations help to explain its meaning to the readers. As supplementary, optional additions, they are not always consistent and often appear occasionally throughout a text. In the manuscripts discussed in this article, however, translation is found where it appears to be unavoidable and, more than that, essential—that is, in a dictionary. A word-by-word translation, the solely possible one for a wordbook, it follows the visual pattern commonly employed by Malay translators of Arabic texts: written in a smaller script, the units of translation are placed diagonally between the lines of the source. While the genre of the text suggests that translation is indispensable, it is still visually presented as a secondary element. Of interest from various perspectives, the vocabulary under discussion is yet to be situated in the history of Arabic-Malay lexicography. First of all, it seems to present a rare example of a handwritten Arabic-to-Malay thematic dictionary which was likely used by Malayspeaking Muslims as a learning aid in their studies of the language of Islam. Arranged in an encyclopaedic way, it provides insights into the Arabic vocabulary that was considered relevant as well as into the compilers’ worldviews and mindsets. Furthermore, the two extant copies of the same dictionary allow us to look into the divergences and misspellings found in the text and discuss the modes of its transmission. And finally, the interlinear arrangement of the dictionary deserves attention, which links it with the tradition of interlinear translation in the Islamic Indonesian-Malay world and beyond. In what follows, I address the aforementioned aspects, starting with the manuscripts’ provenance and description and proceeding to the structure of the vocabulary, juxtaposing the two copies, and discussing the roles of orality and interlinearity in the text’s reproduction and transmission. 9 Stachowski, “The Turkic Languages and Persian,” 225. 10 See Azyumardi Azra, “Naskah Terjemahan Antarbaris: Kontribusi Kreatif Dunia Islam MelayuIndonesia,” in Sadur: Sejarah Terjemahan di Indonesia dan Malaysia, ed. Henri Chambert-Loir (Gramedia, 2009), 435–443; Ronit Ricci, “Reading Between the Lines: A World of Interlinear Translation,” Journal of World Literature 1, no. 1 (2016): 68–80; Ronit Ricci, “Mediating the Maulid: Interlinear Translations of the Maulid syaraf al-anām across the Indonesian-Malay World,” Indonesia and the Malay World 51, no. 150 (2023): 143–164; Arif Maftuhin, “Translating the Untranslatable. The Jalālayn Learning as a Translation Practice,” Indonesia and the Malay World 51, no. 151 (2024): 279– 303. Aglaia Iankovskaia • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 54 Van der Tuuk’s Vocabularies Among the manuscript collection of Van der Tuuk housed in the Leiden University Library, there are three collective volumes with the subsequent numbers Or. 3231, 3232 and 3233. They contain various texts most of which deal with the Arabic language, including ArabicMalay and Arabic-Javanese dictionaries and texts on Arabic grammar.11 Leiden Or. 3232 is copied by Van der Tuuk himself, while Or. 3233 contains marginal notes by his hand. Or. 3233 comprises three Arabic-Malay dictionaries, of which two duplicate those found in Or. 3231: Or. 3233(1) is the same as Or. 3231(6), while Or. 3233(2) is another copy of Or. 3231(8). According to Petrus Voorhoeve, “both volumes were copied about the middle of the 19th century, Or. 3233 in Sumatra. This may also be the place of origin of Or. 3231.”12 If this is indeed the case, the manuscripts must have been acquired by Van der Tuuk sometime between 1851 and 1857 during his travels in western and northern Sumatra. Early in 1851, the linguist, who had been commissioned by the Dutch Bible Society (Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap, NBG) to study the Toba Batak language and ultimately translate the Bible into it, embarked on his voyage from Java and arrived at Padang, a port in the Minangkabau lands and the seat of the colonial government of Sumatra’s West Coast. 13 From there Van der Tuuk continued north to Tapanuli region, where he settled in the coastal town of Sibolga in mid-1851. In late 1851 or early 1852, he moved further north to Barus, also a coastal town, and stayed there until April 1857, when he travelled on foot all the way back to Padang and soon left West Sumatra for good. During his residence in Barus, the scholar undertook several trips into the interior of the island, i.e., to the still independent Toba Batak and Mandailing lands.14 With the help of his local informants, whom he also hired as scribes for copying manuscripts and writing down oral texts, Van der Tuuk accumulated a collection of materials that he later bequeathed to the University of Leiden. The Arabic-Malay vocabularies were apparently among these texts, although it remains unknown where exactly the two manuscripts come from—as the scholar did not keep records 11 See Edwin P. Wieringa, Catalogue of Malay and Minangkabau Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and Other Collections in the Netherlands, vol. 2 (Leiden University Library, 2007), 79–83; Witkam, Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts, 75–77; also Petrus Voorhoeve, “Indonesische handschriften in de Universiteitsbibliotheek te Leiden,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 108, no. 3 (1952): 216; Voorhoeve, Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Collections in the Netherlands (Leiden University Press, 1980), 160, 417–418; Teuku Iskandar, Catalogue of Malay, Minangkabau, and South Sumatran Manuscripts in the Netherlands, vol. 1, (Documentatiebureau Islam-Christendom, 1999), 120–121. 12 Voorhoeve, Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts, 418. 13 Toba Batak are an ethnic group residing in the hinterland of North Sumatra in the vicinity of Lake Toba. At the time of arrival of European Christian missionaries in the 19th century, they had not been impacted by Islamisation and retained their animistic believes. Minangkabau are an ethnic group inhabiting the highlands of western Sumatra. In the mid-19th century, the majority of them already professed Islam. 14 Kees Groenboer, Een vorst onder de taalgeleerden: Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk, taalafgevaardigde voor Indië van het Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap 1847–1873 (KITLV, 2002), 12– 15. Mandailing are a predominantly Muslim Batak ethnic group residing in South Tapanuli. A World of Words and Words for the World • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 55 of places where he acquired his materials.15 In his last, posthumously published work Van der Tuuk mentions an incomplete Arabic-Malay dictionary, apparently Or. 3233(2), that “comes from the Padang Highlands and is here and there Minangkabau-ish.”16 Or. 3233(2) indeed contains a colophon indicating its Minangkabau origins (f. 56v), which reads as follows: “written by a person from Bayang, son of Tuanku in Jambak bearing the title Fakih Sultan at the time of building the surau in the village of Lubuk Gambir” (Yang menyurat dia orang Bayang anak Tuanku di Jambak yang bergelar Fakih Sultan tatkala berbuat surau dalam karya Lubuk Gambir adanya).17 Bayang is a coastal town south of Padang to the north of which a village called Lubuk Gambir can be found, while Jambak refers to a smaller unit within the village named after the Minangkabau clan that the land belonged to.18 In any case, the circumstance that the manuscript was copied in Bayang area does not imply that this was where Van der Tuuk acquired it (likely bought, as the colophon also mentions a price—two rials). Or. 3231(8) does not have a colophon, and very little can be assumed about its origins. Both manuscripts could have been acquired either during the linguist’s overland journey to Padang, in Padang, Sibolga, or in Barus, where a local chief named Tuanku Sutan Ibrahim used to lend Van der Tuuk some of the Malay and Minangkabau texts that he owned.19 Van der Tuuk’s interest in Arabic-Malay dictionaries reflects his research methods and interests as a linguist and lexicographer from different perspectives, among them his background in Arabic studies, his lifelong interest in Malay and unfulfilled plans to compile a new dictionary of this language,20 and his preference of the written word over the spoken one. First and foremost, Van der Tuuk was “a lifelong collector of words, in as many Indonesian languages as he could lay his hands on.”21 Although his primary mission in Sumatra was to study the Toba Batak language, he also used this opportunity to broaden his knowledge of local Malay and Minangkabau. An insight into the linguist’s early engagement with the Arabic-Malay dictionaries he had collected can be found in his letter to the Bible Society, with which he maintained regular correspondence from Barus: These languages are rich and poor, as they like to say: rich in concrete words and poor in abstract ones. Neither Malay nor Batak has a word for animal in general, and I have often seen a native laughing at me because I applied bienatang to a worm. Meanwhile, he has a name for the smallest reptile. This is the case with all peoples who are semi15 Marije Plomp, “Never-neverland Revisited: Malay Adventure Stories: With an Annotated Edition and Translation of the Malay Story of Bahram Syah” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Leiden University, 2014), 58. 16 Herman N. van der Tuuk, Eene aanvulling der Maleische woordenboeken (‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1894), 50; see also Wieringa, Catalogue of Malay and Minangkabau Manuscripts, 81–83. 17 Among the Minangkabau, Tuanku (or Tuangku) is a title of a religious leader or scholar, while surau is a term for Islamic school. For Islamic education and translation practice in surau, see Fadhli Lukman’s article in the present issue. 18 I thank Pramono for his help in identifying the place. 19 Plomp, “Never-neverland Revisited,” 43. 20 See Cornelis D. Grijns, “Van der Tuuk and the Study of Malay,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 152, no. 3 (1996); Andries Teeuw, “Van der Tuuk as Lexicographer,” Archipel, no. 51 (1996): 118, 122. 21 Teeuw, “Van der Tuuk as Lexicographer.” 113. Aglaia Iankovskaia • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 56 civilized, and it is also the reason why, when they come into contact with foreigners, they use foreign words to express abstract ideas, while when they attain without these foreigners the requisite degree of civilisation at which the expression of abstracts becomes necessary, a concrete word gets elevated to an abstract. Isn’t it to be explained in this way that dog (in our language the name of a type of dog) means in English a dog in general? At the same time, hound in English is the name of a type of dog, while for us hond is the general word. The Arabic-Malay dictionaries have elevated concrete words to general ones; thus I find bienatang (wild animal) given as animal and kara (certain small long-tailed monkey) as the general name for monkey, simply because the writers did not find general words for animal and monkey in Malay. The compilers of these dictionaries were probably Malays civilized by Arabs, because the dictionaries provide very few words taken from Arabic as equivalents of the Arabic words to be explained, which would have been the case if the authors were Arab. (Aan Bijbelgenootschap, Baroes 27-3-1854)22 Van der Tuuk approached these dictionaries, which he continued to consult throughout his life, primarily from the perspective of historical linguistics. His last treatise dealt with Malay lexicography, and in it the scholar addressed one of the vocabularies (Or. 3233(2), as mentioned above) as a source on Minangkabau language and its Agam dialect, also pointing to the discrepancies between Arabic words and their vernacular translations.23 In his lexicographical studies, Van der Tuuk used handwritten dictionaries along with multiple other manuscripts that he eagerly collected. Those were texts of most diverse content, as the scholar did not see any literary value in them24 but approached them as mere sources of lexical information. Although oral conversations with native speakers constituted a substantial part of his fieldwork, Van der Tuuk considered written materials the only reliable basis for describing a language. A “conviction of his, to which he adhered also in the daily practice of his lexicographical work in the field, was that words should be studied in their syntactic context and that therefore written texts were an essential tool for a lexicographer. Consequently, the hunter of words automatically became a collector of manuscripts.”25 These Van der Tuuk used to either purchase or commission as copies by local scribes; sometimes he copied texts himself in his sloppy handwriting—as is the case with the ArabicJavanese dictionary found in Leiden Or. 3232. Unlike his materials from Bali, most of the Malay manuscripts in the scholar’s collection were bought rather than copied on order.26 In an article written during his residence in Barus, Van der Tuuk expresses his views on the essential role of texts as recorded by the speakers of the language: Consultation of the natives about their language is very risky and may be useful only for verifying the pronunciation; the meaning of words is better learned from an 22 Quoted in Groenboer, Een vorst onder de taalgeleerden, 203. 23 Tuuk, Eene aanvulling der Maleische woordenboeken, 50–52. 24 Plomp, “Never-neverland Revisited,” 21. 25 Teeuw, “Van der Tuuk as Lexicographer,” 130. 26 Grijns, “Van der Tuuk and the Study of Malay,” 368. A World of Words and Words for the World • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 57 assiduous application to the study of Malay writers than from speaking to people with insufficient education to understand questions about linguistic problems.27 Another consideration of his was apparently an unwillingness to put himself beyond the reach of scholarly criticism, as written sources could serve as proof for the his arguments.28 Handwritten texts formed the basis of Van der Tuuk’s dictionaries, and they have come down to us not only as the linguist’s heritage and evidence of his research methodology and sources, but also as witnesses of West Sumatra’s 19th-century history and cultural milieu, as well as insights into its Islamic education practices, of which teaching and learning Arabic constituted an indispensable part. Apart from purely linguistic inquiries, many questions could be asked in respect of the Arabic-Malay vocabulary preserved in two copies by virtue of Van der Tuuk’s travels and studies. Who were the compilers of this wordlist and what audiences did they aim at? Might it have been written by an autodidact for private use, or was it rather composed by a teacher for students, or by an Arab sheikh for Malay learners of Arabic?29 Were the Arabic words and their vernacular translations written down by the same scribe and at the same time, copied from a written source or orally dictated? What informed the selection of words included in the vocabulary—were they considered useful for a person aspiring to speak Arabic (for instance, planning a journey to Mecca), or for those reading and translating Islamic texts, the words having been extracted from those very texts rather than from the author’s memory? These are far from all the questions that arise. Not all of them can be answered drawing upon the two copies at our disposal, therefore in what follows I will address only some of these questions. Naming Things, Structuring the World In Leiden Or. 3231, al-Jadwal fī kalām al-ʿArab occupies some 80 pages (ff. 44v–4r). The collective volume also contains several other texts by different copyists that would be helpful to a learner of Arabic, i.e., three other Arabic-Malay vocabularies and two texts on Arabic grammar. Only one of the vocabularies is arranged alphabetically (Or. 3231(6)), while the other three are systematic: Or. 3231(7) and (8) list words in thematic sections, while Or. 3231(9) deals with only one topic, which is fiqh. Or. 3231(8) is written by a somewhat sloppy hand in black ink; unlike other manuscripts constituting the volume, it has no rubrication in red. The sections are largely untitled, mostly marked by an overlined word “section” (faṣl), so that the logic of the compiler can only be guessed from the contents. Vocalized Arabic words are put one after another in a line, little space being left between them, while their 27 Herman N. van der Tuuk, “lets over de Hoog-Maleische bijbelvertaling,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde 5, no. 1 (1856): 179. Quoted in Grijns, “Van der Tuuk and the Study of Malay,” 358. On Van der Tuuk’s methotodology in this regard, see also Teeuw, “Van der Tuuk as Lexicographer,” 121. 28 Teeuw, 116. 29 As it appears to be the case with a similar systematic vocabulary, Or. 3231(7), which is said to have been compiled by an imam for his brethren (see Wieringa, Catalogue of Malay and Minangkabau Manuscripts, 2007: 81; Witkam, Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts, 2007: 76). Aglaia Iankovskaia • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 64 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 as a practice and the role of an oral element in its transmission. These observations seem to correspond to the fluidity of interlinear translation as it manifests itself in other bilingual manuscripts from the Indonesian-Malay world and from Sumatra in particular.43 The majority of such manuscripts contain Arabic texts that were part of traditional Islamic education in the region and used to be studied with a teacher whose oral remarks were scribbled by students between the lines of their copies. As a result of this practice, the Arabic source texts (matn) in these manuscripts tend to be less variable than their Malay or other interlinear translations. Providing that the Arabic-Malay vocabulary under discussion might have been once used in a similar study and transmission process, the translation differences between the two versions could result from a teacher’s reinterpretation in the classroom or a student’s hastiness in writing down the translations. Yet the main text, i.e., the Arabic wordlist, was most likely copied from a written source before being brought to the classroom or study circle, its transmission might have also involved oral elements—to which the few phonetical misspellings in it seem to testify. Little is known about scribal practices of manuscript production and reproduction in 19th-century Sumatra, but there is some evidence scattered around the Indonesian-Malay region and across centuries. Dick van der Meij reports Merle Ricklefs’ accounts of his observations in 1960s Yogyakarta, where production of a manuscript was a group activity “done with one person writing while singing the text, another (or others) singing along or singing from an original being copied, others joining in with comments and suggestions, and so on.” Checking the newly made copy also involved singing and working in pairs.44 This latter practice of collating a copy with the original, one scribe reading the source manuscript aloud and another checking the text in the copy, is also mentioned as early as 1603 in a treatise composed in Aceh, i.e., Bukhari al-Jauhari’s Tāj al-salāṭīn.45 Commenting on Merle Ricklefs’ observations in Java, Van der Meij notes that “this is very interesting information as it may have serious implications for the philological method. It is not that a scribe copies the text from a manuscript in front of him, and thus he or she does not necessarily use the same letters used in the exemplar. An oral layer lies between the exemplar and the copy.”46 Such an “oral layer” could indeed explain some of the misspellings found in the two manuscripts of al-Jadwal fī kalām al-ʿArab. Copying a manuscript was not always a group activity, but even as an individual one it could involve oral practices, e.g., the 43 See Aglaia Iankovskaia, “On ‘Hanging Meaning’ and Its Transmission. Tracing a Didactic Poem from Aceh,” Archipel, no. 107 (2024): 119–138. 44 Dick van der Meij, Indonesian Manuscripts from the Islands of Java, Madura, Bali and Lombok (Brill, 2017), 22. 45 Vladimir I. Braginsky, “Malay Scribes on Their Craft and Audience (With Special Reference to the Description of the Reading Assembly by Safirin bin Usman Fadli),” Indonesia and the Malay World 30, no. 86 (2002): 37–38. 46 Van der Meij, Indonesian Manuscripts from the Islands of Java, 22. A World of Words and Words for the World • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 65 scribe simultaneously reading the text aloud and committing it to writing: “the mouth is reading while the hand is writing.”47 Juxtaposing the two copies of the Arabic-Malay vocabulary seems to demonstrate that they are not directly related, apparently stemming from some other copies that were circulating in the region at the time, and that they both contain traces of oral practices having been involved in their transmission. It seems also likely that the Arabic and Malay components of the text were not transmitted at the same time and in the same place—which the vocabulary’s interlinear layout might attest to. In Malay manuscript culture, interlinear translations were viewed as paratextual, optional elements rather than parts of the main text and were often added to the matn as a second layer. In many manuscripts, such translations are not complete and tend to end abruptly after the first few pages—as if the translator had given up the task, or rather only part of the text had been studied by a student with a teacher. Evidence of a similar treatment of lexicographical texts can be found in a manuscript of another Arabic-Malay vocabulary which Van der Tuuk cataloged in the collection of the Royal Asiatic Society after his visit to London in 1865: An Arabic-Malay Dictionary. Under each Arabic word the corresponding Malay is written. The last seven pages are not filled up with the Malay. I possess a complete copy, and a fragment of another work of the same kind.48 This manuscript is RAS Raffles Malay 75 (D) that is still housed in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society.49 As has been noted both by Van der Tuuk and later catalogers,50 its last pages are lacking Malay equivalents for the Arabic words (see Fig. 5). This possibly indicates that compilers of such vocabularies considered translation optional rather than an indispensable part of their treatises. In this light, the Arabic-Malay vocabulary discussed in this article should not be viewed as a dictionary in its usual sense, but rather as a wordlist provided with an interlinear translation. This is indeed how this text identifies itself in the title—“A list of Arabic words.” Why Interlinear? In Lieu of a Conclusion Repeatedly labeled by its European collector and later scholars and catalogers as a “dictionary” or ”vocabulary,” al-Jadwal fī kalām al-ʿArab does not entirely correspond to the (relatively modern) idea of a bilingual lexicographical work comprising words in the source language and their explicit translations to the target one. Neither does it seem to be what it 47 Braginsky, “Malay Scribes on Their Craft,” 39–40. 48 Herman N. van der Tuuk, “Short Account of the Malay Manuscripts Belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2, no. 1 (1866): 124. 49 A digital copy of this manuscript is available online at https://royalasiaticcollections.org/raffles-malay75-fragment-of-malay-laws/ (accessed on 4 May 2025) 50 See Merle C. Ricklefs, Petrus Voorhoeve, and Annabel T. Gallop, Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Indonesian Languages in British Public Collections (Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, 2014), 142. Aglaia Iankovskaia • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 66 resembles to a modern reader at first sight: a personal notebook in which a student of a foreign language writes down words learned and to be learned in an endeavour to systematize their knowledge. The vocabulary in question lies in-between those familiar genres, or rather comprises a lexicographical work of its own genre inherent in the cultural milieu and historical period it comes from. Even if initially compiled by a Malay-speaking learner of Arabic for private use and without any audiences in mind, this text certainly had an afterlife as a teaching and learning aid somewhere in West Sumatra’s Islamic schools and study circles. In this educational milieu, it was read, discussed, and recopied along with other Arabic texts used as teaching materials—which largely explains the misspellings and divergences found in the two manuscripts as well as why interlinear arrangement was employed for a dictionary. Containing not an authoritative Arabic text but a list of words compiled to be learnt and translated, the vocabulary still appears to manifest a hierarchy between the two languages— the source and the target ones, Arabic and Malay—in its layout: the Arabic words are bigger, bolder, and written by finer hand, while their Malay equivalents are smaller and scribbled chaotically in the spaces remaining between the lines. Yet it seems to be not only a perceived superiority of the language of the Qur’an over a vernacular that is reflected in the vocabulary, a work otherwise striving for certain equivalence between two languages, but also a hierarchy of a different kind—that between the text and paratext, the “black lines” of the matn and the “white spaces,” i.e., interlinear ones, filled with translation or annotation.51 Engaged in the same practices of transmission and consumption as other texts in Arabic used in Islamic education in the Indonesian-Malay world, al-Jadwal fī kalām al-ʿArab was apparently considered to reside in the same categories as those other texts: its Arabic and Malay components were not considered equal and inseparable, but were treated as the main text and auxiliary, explanatory notes. And in accordance with this distinction, different methods of transmission seem to have been applied to each. As I have attempted to demonstrate in this article, the history of reproduction of the two copies of the vocabulary likely included both written and oral transmission, i.e., at different points in time the text might have been copied directly from a manuscript and at others written down by dictation. Various misspellings and discrepancies found in the Leiden manuscripts stem, therefore, not only from visual misinterpretations of letters and slips of pen by the scribe, but also from the “oral layers” between a source manuscript and its copy. In the case of the Arabic wordlist, which was considered the main text and thus was likely recopied directly from written sources, such an oral layer is limited to a few misspellings resulting from writing down by ear. As for the Malay translation below the line, it fell within the category of notes written down by students following the teacher’s explanations—a sort of paratext open to improvement and modification—and thus appears to have been shaped by oral transmission to a much greater extent. Despite Van der Tuuk’s distrust of the spoken word, orality still found its way into the manuscripts he collected. The Arabic-Malay vocabulary that came down to us thanks to the Dutch lexicographer’s studies and travels in Sumatra offers many interesting perspectives for inquiry. This article 51 See Mulaika Hijjas, “Marks of Many Hands. Annotation in the Malay Manuscript Tradition and a Sufi Compendium from West Sumatra,” Indonesia and the Malay World 45, no. 132 (2017): 246. A World of Words and Words for the World • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 67 has only touched upon some of them. The two copies of the wordlist not only shed some light on the modes of such manuscripts’ reproduction, but also reveal cultural and linguistic encounters within the Islamic world, i.e., between the Indonesian-Malay region and the Middle East—the encounters that unfold between the lines, in the interlinear spaces reserved for translation. Styled as a cosmography, attempting to describe the world around it in both the language of the scripture and the mother tongue, al-Jadwal fī kalām al-ʿArab provides an insight into the sociolinguistic microcosm of its compilers and their audiences, who likely belonged to the same Malay-speaking and Arabic-reading Islamic educational circles of 19thcentury Sumatra. References AZRA, Azyumardi. “Naskah Terjemahan Antarbaris: Kontribusi Kreatif Dunia Islam MelayuIndonesia.” In Sadur Sejarah Terjemahan di Indonesia dan Malaysia, edited by Henri ChambertLoir. Gramedia, 2009. BRAGINSKY, Vladimir I. “Malay Scribes on Their Craft and Audience (With Special Reference to the Description of the Reading Assembly by Safirin bin Usman Fadli).” Indonesia and the Malay World 30, no. 86 (2002): 37–61. FERRI, Rolando. “The Greco-Roman World.” In The Cambridge World History of Lexicography, edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, 2019. GRIJNS, Cornelis D. “Van der Tuuk and the Study of Malay.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 152, no. 3 (1996): 353–381. GROENBOER, Kees. Een vorst onder de taalgeleerden: Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk, taalafgevaardigde voor Indië van het Nederlandsch Bijbelgenootschap 1847–1873. KITLV, 2002. HAYWOOD, John A. Arabic Lexicography. Brill, 1960. HIJJAS, Mulaika. “Marks of Many Hands. Annotation in the Malay Manuscript Tradition and a Sufi Compendium from West Sumatra.” Indonesia and the Malay World 45, no. 132 (2017): 226–249. HOOGERVORST, Tom G. “Seventeenth-Century Malay Wordlists and Their Potential for Etymological Scholarship.” Wacana 25, no. 3 (2024): 531–575. IANKOVSKAIA, Aglaia. “Between Translation and Commentary: An Interlinear Text from the Collection of Snouck Hurgronje.” Archipel, no. 106 (2023): 89–124. — . “On ‘Hanging Meaning’ and Its Transmission. Tracing a Didactic Poem from Aceh.” Archipel, no. 107 (2024): 119–138. — . “Reading Arabic in Sumatra. Interlinear Translation in Didactic Contexts.” Indonesia and the Malay World 52, no. 153 (2024): 221–242. ISKANDAR, Teuku. Catalogue of Malay, Minangkabau, and South Sumatran Manuscripts in the Netherlands. Vol. 1. Documentatiebureau Islam-Christendom, 1999. KAPTEIN, Nico J.G. “Some Early Contributions to Arabic-Malay Lexicography: Sayyid ‘Uthmān of Batavia (1822-1913) as a Lexicographer.” In Malay Images. Edited by Asmah Haji Omar. UPSI, 2005. LAFFAN, Michael. “New Charts for the Arabic Ocean; Dictionaries as Indicators of Changing Times.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 159, no. 2–3 (2003): 351–387. Aglaia Iankovskaia • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 68 MAFTUHIN, Arif. “Translating the Untranslatable. The Jalālayn Learning as a Translation Practice.” Indonesia and the Malay World 51, no. 151 (2024): 279–303. MEIJ, Dick van der. Indonesian Manuscripts from the Islands of Java, Madura, Bali and Lombok. Brill, 2017. PLOMP, Marije. “Never-neverland Revisited: Malay Adventure Stories: With an Annotated Edition and Translation of the Malay Story of Bahram Syah.” PhD Dissertation, Leiden University, 2014. RICCI, Ronit. “Reading Between the Lines: A World of Interlinear Translation.” Journal of World Literature 1, no. 1 (2016): 68–80. — . “Mediating the Maulid. Interlinear Translations of the Maulid syaraf al-anām across the Indonesian-Malay World.” Indonesia and the Malay World 51, no. 150 (2023): 143–164. RICKLEFS, Merle C., Petrus Voorhoeve, and Annabel T. Gallop. Indonesian Manuscripts in Great Britain: A Catalogue of Manuscripts in Indonesian Languages in British Public Collections. New edition with addenda et corrigenda. Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, 2014. STACHOWSKI, Marek. “The Turkic Languages and Persian to c. 1700.” In The Cambridge World History of Lexicography. Edited by John Considine. Cambridge University Press, 2019. TEEUW, Andries. “Van der Tuuk as Lexicographer.” Archipel, no. 51 (1996): 113–133. TUUK, Herman N. van der. “lets over de Hoog-Maleische bijbelvertaling.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde, no. 5 (1856): 171–83. — . “Short Account of the Malay Manuscripts Belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2, no. 1 (1866): 85–135. — . Eene aanvulling der Maleische woordenboeken. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1894. VOORHOEVE, Petrus. “Indonesische handschriften in de Universiteitsbibliotheek te Leiden.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 108, no.3 (1952): 209–219. — . Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and Other Collections in the Netherlands. Leiden University Press, 1980. WIERINGA, Edwin P. Catalogue of Malay and Minangkabau Manuscripts in the Library of Leiden University and Other Collections in the Netherlands. Vol. 2. Leiden University Library, 2007. WILKINSON, Richard J. A Malay-English Dictionary. Kelly and Walsh, 1901. WITKAM, Jan Just. Inventory of the Oriental Manuscripts of the Library of the University of Leiden. Vol. 4. Ter Lugt Press, 2007. A World of Words and Words for the World • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 69 Illustrations Fig. 1 Leiden Or. 3231, Leiden University Libraries, ff. 45r–44v. Fig. 2 Leiden Or. 3233, Leiden University Libraries, ff. 37v–38r Aglaia Iankovskaia • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 70 Fig. 3 Leiden Or. 3231, Leiden University Libraries, ff. 28r–27v. Fig. 4 Leiden Or. 3233, Leiden University Libraries, ff. 40v–41r. A World of Words and Words for the World • 25.3 (2025) IntlinTr: 51–71 Page | 71 Fig. 5 RAS Raffles Malay 75 (D), Royal Asiatic Society, ff. 152–153. © Aglaia Iankovskaia, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, UK ◄ ai[email protected].uk ►