Some words in use among the natives met on the journey to Batu Lawi
J. C. Moulton’s 1912 appendix to the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. 63, pp. 100–104) presents a comparative vocabulary of approximately 150 lexical items recorded during his 1911 expedition to Mount Batu Lawi in the upper Limbang district of Sarawak. The list documents words in three closely related but distinct languages—Tabun (T), Murut (M), and Kalabit (K)—encountered along the route from the Limbang River through the Madihit valley to the mountain itself, and it closes with a short set of numerals in Tabun and Murut.
Summary
The vocabulary is organized alphabetically by English gloss and covers a broad range of semantic fields: body parts (ear, elbow, knee, lips, shoulder), natural phenomena (rain, mist, flood, wind, sky), domestic life (rice, pillow, roof, key, lock), animals (bear, dog, fowl, monkey, porcupine, spider), and abstract concepts (cunning, fear, hatred, love, truth). Each entry is tagged with the language(s) in which it was recorded, making it possible to identify cognates and divergences across the three groups. For instance, “fire” appears as apui in both Tabun and Murut; “river” as arōrr in all three; “eat” as kumān in all three; while “leg” diverges into ko’ud (Tabun) and kokod (Murut), and “mother” into ina (Tabun) and tinan (Murut) (pp. 100–104).
The list is embedded within a much larger expedition narrative by Moulton and colleagues (Ridley, Copeland, Smith, Griffini, Laidlaw) that documents the first European ascent to the base of Batu Lawi, a peak in the border mountains of Brunei and Sarawak. The linguistic material was gathered from Tama Belulok (a Tabun chief), Penribut (a Kalabit guide), and various Murut and Dayak companions over the course of a 40-day journey from Limbang to Claudetown on the Baram River. Moulton explicitly notes that the Tabuns “talk Malay, Dayak, Murut and Kalabit with equal ease,” and that the Murut and Kalabit dialects are “certainly very close to Tabun but are nevertheless quite distinct” (p. 25).
The appendix serves a dual purpose: it is both a practical field record of linguistic contact in a sparsely documented region and a contribution to the comparative study of the Kenyah–Kayan–Murut language family. The inclusion of numerals at the close (1–10, 100, 1000 in Tabun and Murut) provides a small but useful anchor for further comparative work.
Key Findings
- The vocabulary records approximately 150 entries across three languages, with many items attested in two or all three, confirming close genetic relationship while documenting systematic divergence (pp. 100–104).
- Shared cognates across all three languages include arōrr (river), kumān (eat), apui (fire), bulan (moon), langit (sky), batu (stone), and scales (era), suggesting a common ancestral lexicon for basic vocabulary (pp. 100–104).
- Notable divergences include ina vs. tinan for “mother,” ko’ud vs. kokod for “leg,” and bākōu vs. gaman for “spear,” indicating regular sound correspondences between the varieties (pp. 102–103).
- Several entries show Malay or Brunei-Malay influence, particularly in trade and administration vocabulary: belanjar (money, hire, T), baru (new, T), baju (coat, T), and tanah (earth, T. M.), reflecting the role of Malay as a regional lingua franca (pp. 100–102).
- The numerals section records Tabun and Murut forms for 1–10, 100 (ma’ratu), and 1000 (ma’ribu), providing a basis for further comparative reconstruction within the family (p. 104).
- Moulton’s narrative confirms that the Tabun, Murut, and Kalabit speakers he met were mutually intelligible to a significant degree, with Tabun speakers acting as natural interpreters between the other groups and the Dayak and Malay-speaking members of the party (p. 25).
Conclusion
Moulton’s vocabulary, though modest in size, constitutes one of the earliest systematic word-lists for the Tabun, Murut, and Kalabit varieties encountered in the upper Limbang–Madihit region. Its value lies less in any single entry than in the pattern of correspondences it reveals, which corroborates the close genetic affinity of these languages and provides a baseline against which later, more extensive comparative work (such as Douglas’s 1911 vocabulary of Kayan, Kenyah, and Kalabit) can be measured. The list also documents the degree of Malay lexical borrowing already present in these communities by 1911, a process that would accelerate dramatically in the decades following Sarawak’s administrative consolidation of the interior.
Context
- The expedition was undertaken under the auspices of the Sarawak Government and the Sarawak Museum; Moulton’s preliminary account appeared in the Sarawak Gazette (1911, pp. 148–151), and the full narrative with this appendix was published in the JSBRAS in 1912.
- The linguistic data complement the ethnographic and zoological observations in the main narrative, which documents the material culture, burial customs, and social organization of the Tabun, Kalabit, Murut, and Adang peoples of the upper Limbang basin.