OCCASIONAL NOTE. 



:o:o:- 



The Journal Asiatique for January, 1883, laid before the public 

 a short article entitled Quelques Notes de Lexicologie Malaise. Ad- 

 ditions au Dictionaire Malais-Frangais de VAbbe Favre, par M. 

 Marcel Devic. The notes which M. Devic offered as a contribu- 

 tion to a future supplement of Eayre's Malay- French Dictionary 

 include a meagre list of thirty words only, and these seem to have 

 been collected during a perusal of the Sajarah Malay u, in the 

 course of which the contributor discovered what seemed to him to 

 be omissions in the dictionary. 



M. Devic is known to us by a translation of the Sajarah Malay u, 

 in which, however, the explanatory and critical notes are few and 

 unimportant. 



The dictionary of the Abbe Favre found a champion at once in 

 M. Aristide Marre, who, in a paper which occupies twenty pages 

 of Le Museon (No. 2 of 1883), examined critically M. Devic's con- 

 tribution. Each note is dealt with in turn, and if M. Marre is 

 always right, M. Devic, with whom he seldom or ever agrees, must 

 be almost invariably wrong. But the criticisms of the writer in 

 Le Museon seem to be often less happy than the suggestions of the 

 contributor of the Journal Asiatique . The word urdi, which occurs 

 in the Sajarah Malaiju, has occasioned some discussion ; M. Devic 

 thinks those wrong who have derived it from the English word 

 " order," and supposes that, when the chronicle describes Albu- 

 querque as going to Europe for urdi, it is an armada that is meant. 

 M. Marre points out that, besides " order " in English and Dutch, 

 urdi may possibly be referable to ordem, ordens, in Portuguese. 

 There is little to be said for M. Devic's emendation, but it is not 

 necessary, on the other hand, to agree with M. Marre that le mot 

 " urdi " est Malais. He will find it to be Hindustani quite as much, 



