A Murut vocabulary. With an introductory note G.C. Woolley
N.B. Baboneau, an officer in the British North Borneo Service, compiled this Murut vocabulary between 1911 and 1914 with the assistance of Keningau Murut speakers; it was published posthumously in 1922 with an introductory note by G.C. Woolley, who supplies the ethnographic and dialectological framework. The work represents one of the earliest systematic attempts to record the Murut language in written form, produced within the context of expanding colonial administration in the interior of British North Borneo.
Summary
The introductory note by Woolley addresses a central problem in Murut ethnography: the absence of any prior scholarly classification of the tribes inhabiting the interior highlands of British North Borneo. Woolley proposes a working typology of four main tribal groupings—Dabai and Timugun on the plains, Peluan and Semambu among the hills—while acknowledging that the number of petty subdivisions with small dialectal variations is very large. He observes that under European government, raiding has died out and intercourse has become freer, causing tribal boundaries to become obscured and dialectical differences to become less accentuated. A Murut asked his race would typically identify by local river or settlement rather than by any of these broader groupings (pp. 343–344).
Woolley then turns to the practical difficulty of dialectal variation as an obstacle to producing a satisfactory vocabulary. He provides a series of illustrative comparisons across the Keningau (K), Timugun (T), and Semambu (S) dialects, demonstrating that common letters are frequently interchanged and that the Keningau dialect shows a particular fondness for initial ‘m’ often absent in the ulu Padas Semambu speech. He notes that the Semambu dialect is considerably more distinct from the other three, which are fairly closely related to one another, though an untravelled Semambu man placed in Keningau could still gather roughly what was being said (pp. 344–345).
The vocabulary itself, spanning approximately thirty pages, is a practical A–Z lexicon with English glosses, occasional example sentences in Murut, and frequent borrowings from Malay marked with ‘(M)’. It covers the full range of everyday life—subsistence agriculture (hill and wet padi), hunting, warfare, kinship, domestic architecture, flora and fauna, and spiritual beliefs including a typology of ghosts (kraganan, tentolong, ambiruoh, berioh, keragioh). Woolley is candid that the work is incomplete, noting that further research would doubtless reveal many native terms in place of the Malay or semi-Malay forms given (p. 343).
Key Findings
- The vocabulary was compiled between 1911 and 1914 with the help of “various Keningau Muruts, intelligent and otherwise,” as stated in a pencil note on the fly-leaf dated “Rundum 1914” (p. 343).
- Woolley identifies four main tribal groupings: Dabai and Timugun (plains), Peluan and Semambu (hills), with the Semambu stretching from the S.E. part of Pensiangan through the Tagul, Siliu, Rundum, Selalir, Telecosan and Tomani rivers, across the Padas to Bole, and perhaps to Lawas in Sarawak (pp. 343–344).
- The name ‘Murut’ was an exonym given by Brunei Malay and other coast people to the inhabitants of the hills and interior; the people themselves identified by local river or settlement (p. 343).
- Dialectal variation is substantial: for example, ‘cold’ is K. mesimoh vs. S. asimoh; ‘afraid’ is K. malah vs. S. alah; ‘rain’ is K. domassam vs. T. & P. rasam vs. S. unguluh; ‘pig’ is K. bawih vs. S. biag (pp. 344–345).
- The Murut year is reckoned by the padi harvest cycle (bilod), from the clearing of jungle to the end of the panawongun (the two months after harvest before the new crop is planted), roughly 13 months (p. 375).
- The vocabulary records a five-fold typology of ghosts: kraganan (ghosts of the dead, invisible), tentolong (power to carry people up trees), ambiruoh (follow people in the jungle and annoy them), berioh (always cause death), and keragioh (haunt the jungle, supposed to eat people) (p. 356).
Conclusion
This document is best understood as a practical colonial-era linguistic record of limited but genuine scholarly ambition. Woolley’s introductory note, while brief, provides a useful early framework for Murut tribal distribution and dialectology that remained unchallenged for some time. The vocabulary itself, though incomplete and heavily influenced by Malay loanwords, constitutes a foundational reference for the Keningau dialect and preserves a snapshot of Murut material culture, subsistence practices, and cosmology at the moment of intensified colonial contact.
Context
- Both Baboneau and Woolley were officers in the British North Borneo Service; the vocabulary was compiled for practical administrative and communicative purposes in the interior districts, and Woolley’s note reflects the contemporary administrative framing of tribal classification as a tool for governance (pp. 343–344).
- The source material is Baboneau’s original typewritten manuscript, found among his papers after his death, with numerous pencil additions and corrections; no other archival collections are cited (p. 343).