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TERNATE 140
THE TERNATESE LANGUAGE
It is an old custom at the Ternatese court to record important events, and while the
records have not always been maintained and have been badly damaged through the
neglect of clerks and subordinates, in what was left of the court chronicle (which was
always put at my disposal for perusal most willingly), I found many items which could help
to clarify less well-known events in Ternatese history. When I asked the present Sultan
about the possibility of obtaining copies of old letters and manuscripts, he offered to have
copied for me, from the extant papers, a text known as “An Account of the Earthquake in
1840,” and also a description of the ceremony which took place at his own accession to the
throne. These documents, together with an ordinance of the Sultan Mohamad Jain, have
been included in this book together with a translation. In the translation I have aimed
more at a literal rendering than at form or style, and have added [p. 196] a detailed
glossary [“Word-List”] containing all the words occurring in the story of my travels. The
two most striking peculiarities of the Ternatese language, the exclusive use of prefixes and
the use of different forms for the genders, are explained in the glossary with many
examples. 5
About the contents I can be brief. It hardly needs mentioning that small matters
which interest us very little are repeatedly emphasized in native documents. For the sake
of comparison, however, I have included an abstract from the diary of the Resident during
the catastrophe in 1840 and an abstract from “Note on the Ceremony during a Funeral,”
each dealing briefly with the subject matter stated.
I must point out that it has been claimed that a few words belong to an old language
which is little known at present and no longer spoken. Whether this is Old Jailolo, as
Campen claims on page 443 of his first series of pantuns, I am not sure⎯especially since in
neither this nor his second series can a single obsolete word be found.
5 [p. 196, n. 1] I came across a list of Ternatese plant names with short notes on their
medicinal use, and have included it in the “Word-List” together with the corresponding words in
Miquel’s Flora van Nederlandsch-Indië and Filet’s Plantkundig Woordenboek (Botanical Dictionary),
the latter a continuous “cacography” of Indies plant names, corrected when possible.
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