The Dutch-Malay word-list of Peter Floris (1604
This note by C. A. Gibson-Hill identifies and describes an unfinished Dutch-Malay vocabulary compiled in 1604 at Acheh by Pieter Willemsz van Elbinck (Peter Floris), which is the earliest known attempt to compile a Malay vocabulary in Jawi (Arabic) script (p. 204).
The manuscript, now in the Cambridge University Library, is titled in Dutch as a “Storehouse” of Dutch and Malay words arranged in chapters, and is dated 1 June 1604 (p. 205). Gibson-Hill traces Floris’s career from his birth in Elbing (East Prussia) through his service with the Dutch East India Company on the Coromandel coast and a mission to Arakan, and later his participation in the English East India Company’s seventh voyage aboard the Globe in 1611, under the name Peter Williamson Floris (p. 205). The vocabulary is incomplete: the first chapter (“on man and his limbs”) has 53 Dutch words with Malay equivalents for all but two; the second (“on the four elements”) has 35 words with only 18 translations; and the third (“concerning the city, the houses and the situation of Acheh”) lists 15 Dutch words with no translations at all (p. 205). The manuscript passed through the library of the Dutch scholar Erpenius and was acquired by the Duke of Buckingham for Cambridge, where it went unnoticed until Dr van Ronkel published it with critical notes in 1896 (p. 205). Gibson-Hill also notes that the same volume contains a Malay “History of Joseph” and a Telugu alphabet, and that the Bodleian Library holds two Malay documents from Acheh dated c. 1602 that are probably the oldest extant Malay manuscripts (p. 205).