Hikayat Banjar

bibliography

text notes

list of words

list of rhyme words

Bibliography

title:		Hikayat Banjar
edition:		J.J. Ras, Hikajat Bandjar: A Study in Malay Historiography,  The Hague: Nijhoff (Koninklijk Insitituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde), 1968.  Bibliotheca Indonesica no.1.
manuscripts:		[synthesized from five manuscripts].
dates:		text:  "in or soon after 1663" (Ras, p.181);    manuscript:  1800s.
provenance:		text:  Banjarmasin, Southeast Kalimantan and Kota Waringin, South Kalimantan.
words:		43073 words, including 45 verses
references:		the numbered lines (1-4784) of Ras’ edition.

 

 
Editorial notes

Ras has identified two recensions of this text.  His edition is a critical edition based on six manuscripts of Recension I, the shorter of the two recensions.

Through internal evidence he suggests that the text has been written by three or four authors.  The first (1-3630), second (3631-3962) and third (3963-4233) must have written at Banjarmasin, while the fourth (4234-4785) must have written at Kota Waringin.  Ras also observes that, independent of these contributors, the language of the first half of the text uses more Malay and Arabic words, while the latter half falls more under Javanese influence.

 Language:

The language of the text is not standard Malay.  It contains a great many Banjarese, Ngaju Dayak, and Javanese forms.  Futhermore, in his transcription, Ras has added Banjarese vowelling, making the text even more divergent from standard Malay forms.  In order to make this text searchable as far as possible on the same terms as the rest of the corpus, the following steps have been taken.

•  Malay equivalents have been added when there are cognate Malay forms.  Ras gives a great many of these forms in his Glossary.

•  Banjarese and Javanese morphology has been accommodated to standard Malay as far as possible. In particular:

•  Forms with reduplication of the initial syllable have been additionally treated as having reduplication of the full root:  e.g. lalangit is tagged as both lelangit and langit_langit.

•  Prefix pi- has been assimilated to pe-

•  The Banjarese spellings imposed by Ras have been reverse-engineered to give more standard Malay forms.  This results in many pseudo-Malay forms, which seem to have a Malay morphology, but are constructed on non-Malay roots:  e.g. pedudusan, from dudus, 'to observe purification rites'.

These accommodations should be invisible to the user, but they may throw up some unexpected or redundant matches.  

At the conclusion of a copy of this text that he had sweated over, the Batavian scribe Muhammad Cing Sa'idullah adds these apposite verses:

Telah selesailah disuratkan tunduk tengada sambil memikirkan perkataan Jawa Melayu bukan mana yang tiada patut diubahkan

At last I've finished the writing now, as I bow my head with furrowed brow. The words weren't Malay, they were Javanese! so I've changed them where they might displease.

 
Preparation 

Added:  1999 - April 2000

The 1968 edition was scanned for the MCP in Canberra using Recognita™ OCR.  The spelling was modernised and the text extensively tagged in the manner described above.

 

top