A Kelantan glossary
W. E. Pepys, a Civil Service officer stationed in Pasir Puteh, published this glossary in 1916 to document the distinctive features of Kelantan Malay as spoken in the early colonial period. The work addresses the practical and linguistic problem that Kelantan’s dialect—shaped by heavy Siamese contact and internal phonological shifts—was largely unintelligible to both European administrators arriving from the Federated Malay States and to Malays from the western states. It is the only published collection of Kelantan phrases and idioms that Pepys knew of beyond Sturrock’s 1912 notes, and it was compiled from direct field observation supplemented by input from Malay clerks.
Summary
Pepys organises his material around three categories: words peculiar to Kelantan (most of Siamese origin), words shared with the F.M.S. but used in a different sense, and literary words that survive in daily Kelantan speech but are rarely heard elsewhere. The introductory sections on pronunciation, time-phrases, numbers, and personal pronouns establish the systematic phonological and semantic divergences that make Kelantan Malay a genuinely distinct variety rather than merely an accent. The bulk of the article is an alphabetical glossary of roughly two hundred entries, each with a brief definition and often a comparative note to the F.M.S. or Pahang equivalent.
The glossary reveals a dialect in which Siamese administrative and commercial vocabulary has been deeply absorbed—kweng for territorial division, nebeng for kampong headman, sakar for sugar, riyal for the Straits dollar—while simultaneously developing its own idiom for concepts like property (hak as possessive pronoun), social relations (kita for “you,” dema for “they”), and the local economy (gudang for shop, kedai for market stall, kolek for a large fishing boat). The author’s phonetic spelling, adopted because most entries were never written, preserves colloquial forms that standard orthography would obscure.
A short appendix translates a Kelantan Malay’s account of two pre-colonial judicial ordeals: the hukum menyilam (test by immersion, in which champions dive and the first to surface loses) and the hukum ber-chelor (test by scalding, in which accused plunge hands into boiling coconut oil to retrieve a written token). These accounts, set “about twenty years ago, before there were white men in Kelantan,” provide a rare first-person native description of customary legal practice as it existed immediately before British administrative takeover.
Key Findings
- The Kelantan depa is the Siamese measure of 6.6 feet; the penjur (a land measure of 400 square depa) yields a conversion of 2½ penjur to 1 acre (p. 316).
- The pitis—a round tin coin with a central hole, five to the cent—was the chief unit of market currency; the kendri (3 cents) and kupang (12½ cents) were non-coin denominations used in colloquial price-talk (pp. 310, 315, 318).
- The Angin Besar, a great wind that swept Kelantan from coast to interior roughly thirty years before 1916, served as the generational dating reference for the older population, analogous to “the entry of the orang puteh” in the F.M.S. (p. 306).
- The kweng (Siamese) was the territorial division corresponding to the F.M.S. mukim; the nebeng (Siamese) headed the kampong and reported to the Toh Kweng, while the word Penghulu in Kelantan referred exclusively to the native petition-writer or “lawyer burok” (p. 315).
- The hukum menyilam required two unconnected male passers-by to dive 5–6 feet in a river, each holding a post; the party whose champion surfaced first lost. The hukum ber-chelor required accused to retrieve a written token from boiling coconut oil, the innocent one escaping scalding “by some magic in the metal” (p. 321).
- The kolek in Kelantan was a large fishing boat costing approximately $200 (comparable to the Pahang jalak), not the small canoe of that name found in Tioman (p. 315).
Conclusion
Pepys’s definitive contribution is the demonstration that Kelantan Malay constitutes a recognisably separate dialect variety, distinguished from the F.M.S. standard not merely by a sprinkling of foreign words but by systematic phonological reduction, the wholesale adoption of Siamese administrative and commercial terminology, and the survival of literary and archaic forms in living speech. The glossary, though modest in scope and self-avowedly incomplete, remains a foundational reference for the historical sociolinguistics of eastern Peninsular Malaysia.
Context
- Pepys was a European Civil Service officer in the Kelantan administration; the glossary was explicitly compiled to assist Europeans (and by extension other Malays) in making themselves understood in a state whose dialect was opaque to outsiders (p. 303).
- The work draws on the Straits Branch R.A.S. journal and acknowledges R. O. Winstedt’s editorial input, situating it within the small community of colonial-era linguists and administrators who documented Malay dialects for practical governance purposes.