2 - Translating the World: Three Thematic Glossaries from Sumatra

The paper looks into three handwritten Arabic-Malay vocabularies originating in mid-nineteenth-century Sumatra. Housed in the Leiden University Library with the numbers Or. 3231 (7, 8) and 3233 (2), the manuscripts belong to the collection of Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk (1824–1894), a well-known Dutch linguist and Bible translator. They contain lists of Arabic words arranged in thematic sections and provided with their Malay equivalents under the line. Apparently compiled by learners of Arabic for personal use rather than any audiences, the glossaries appear to be structured in an intuitively encyclopaedic way, starting with God’s names and words describing the natural world and proceeding with sections dealing with human society and everyday life. The paper discusses some of the latter sections, which reveal cultural and linguistic encounters within the Islamic world, i.e. between the Middle East and the Indonesian-Malay region.