98 ACCOUNTS OF THE MALAY TAPIR. 
The Malay name of the tapir is tenok eS) and what 
we should expect would be that the writer, who was of course 
describing an animal that was quite new and unknown to his 
readers, would endeavour to render this word in the ideo- 
graphs of the language in which he was writing. What we 
should expect him to say is © in the mountains of this country 
a supernatural’ (or, perhaps, rather, extraordinary’’) animal is 
found called the tenok. 
And this is, I venture to suggest, what Ge author has 
actually written. 
Searching through the various dialects of the Chinese 
= 
language for a dialect in which ep iE will represent the sound 
tenok, we find that in the Hylam dialect yg is pronounced 
‘tin’? whilst in the greater number of the other dialects it is 
“sin” or shin.” 
The Hylam dialect would therefore appear to be indicated 
however remains © lok”’ as in the Mandarin dialect. We 
therefore get © tin-lok,’’ which, though it takes us a good part 
of the way, is not entirely satisfactory. -I am informed how- 
ever by the Chinese interpreters of the Supreme Court that 
there is no ideograph which represents the word “nok.” It 
would therefore appear: either that sp represents the nearest 
sound possible in the Chinese language to the Malay word 
tenok, or else that, in A. D. 1416, it was pronounced “ nok.” 
The passage in the Ying-yai Shéng-lan is interesting in 
more than one respect. Firstly, if my suggestion that these 
two ideographs represent the word tenok is correct, it shows that — 
the writer of that work was a Hylam; a native, that is to 
say, of the Island of Hainan, a fact which both the geographi- 
cal position of that island with regard to the countries mention- 
ed in the account, and the skill and daring in navigation of its 
inhabitants render extremely probable. | 
I am more inclined to believe the writer of the Ying-yai 
Shéng-lan to have been a Hylam from the passage in the work 
where, also in an account of Sumatra, he gives (according to 
Jour, Straits Branch, 
