Harimau

Abstract

KORTE MEDEDELINGEN 261 In the:light of what has been seen.it wl come.as no surprise that in the epithet Harimau Allah, sometimes given to the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law Al, the word harimau renders the Arabic- Asad.5 Similarly in a text from Sungai Ujong, recorded in a manuscript dating from circa 1900 AD, the word asad occurring in an Arabic Tradition is rendered in Malay by harimau.8 It can be assumed that if the translation had been made not from Malay but directly from Arabic, the appropriate English equivalent in each case would have been "lion";T whereas in fact in every instance harimau has been translated by "tiger" (or of course "tijger" where the translation is into Dutch). What has been said does not exclude the possibilty (however remote) that the range of meaning of the Arabic words for "lion" could be extended to embrace "tiger".8 It is therefore of interest to find confirmation of what has been postulated from an Italian source: in Antonio Pigafetta's word-list of 1521 AD there is an item "94. al leonne (Lion) : hurimau".* It is naturally not to be inferred from this that harimau could not in the old texts connote "tiger" it was the normal Malay name for that animal, native to the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, Java and Bali. Early attestation of this can be found in a Chinese-Malay vocabulary from Malacca (possibly 15th century AD), where the Chinese word for "tiger" is rendered with harimau, and the Chinese for "lion" (more probably "lion-cub") is rendered singa.10 Lion and tiger alike share a reputation for strength and courage; and the truth seems to be that in Malay eyes the lion, which they did not know at first hand, and the tiger, which they did know, sometimes merged into the ome concept denoted by hariinau.11 Wilkinson in his invaluable dictionary does not 5 Cf.