Some rare words: kutaha, nakas, turap, teterapan, kop, biram, ganteh, Seri Menanti
This is a brief philological note by R. O. Winstedt examining the meanings of several rare Malay words—kutaha, nakas, turap, tētērapan, kop, biram, ganteh, and Sēri Mēnanti—with reference to Wilkinson’s Dictionary of the Malay Language and related texts (p. 49).
Winstedt discusses each word in turn, offering corrections and etymological connections. He links tētērapan to turap (meaning ‘to dress, plaster, line’), identifies kop as a general term for ‘dome, cupola’ drawing on Achinese khob, and clarifies that biram refers not merely to an elephant but to a mythical two-headed snake, explaining the puzzle-ring term chinchin patah biram (p. 50). For ganteh, he argues the correct reading in the Sēri Rama folk-tale is ‘thick in the centre; barrel-shaped,’ corroborated by Wilkinson’s Sēri Mēnanti, and notes that a later Malay philologist had misread the word as ganti (p. 50). Finally, he proposes that the toponym Sēri Mēnanti derives not from a rice variety but from seri menganti (the Javanese ‘waiting-hall’), a more probable etymological source (p. 50).