Jelebu Customary Songs and Sayings 



Collected by A. Caldecott, 



WITH PREFACE AXD NOTES BY E. 0. WlXSTEDT. 



These teromba e Songs of Origin/ and these * Customary Say- 

 ings ' pebilangan adat. as they are called in Xegri Sembilan or 

 pepatah to use their Minangkabau name, were collected by Mr. 

 Caldecott in Jelebu. of which State he has written an adequate 

 history (Papers on Malay Subjects; second series, Xo. 1: F. M. S. 

 Govt. Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1912). 



A great deal of material has been printed on the Minangkabau 

 Malays of Xegri Sembilan — Martin Listens careful articles, Mr. 

 Humphreys' Xaning Proverbs and excellent Wedding Speech from 

 Xaning, papers by O'Brien and Hervey and Bland, and Messrs. 

 Parr and Mackray's exhaustive " Eemb.au " have all been published 

 in past Journals. Mr. Wilkinson, who had then never lived in 

 Negri Sembilan, wrote an extraordinarily illuminating introduction 

 to the adat perpateh in " Law II " in ' w Papers on Malay Subjects." 

 Many of the articles that have appeared overlap, and the present 

 collection is no exception. But all is grist to the mill of compara- 

 tive method. '' Knowledge is knowledge of relations," — especially 

 in the Minangkabau world ! — and this paper has profited by com- 

 parison with those earlier articles; as well as with the adat of 

 Minangkabau and its Sumatran colonies as delineated in Willinck's 

 " Het Eechtsleven bij de Minangkabausche Maleiers " (Leiden. 

 1909) and in the series of volumes on Malayan custom published 

 by " Het Koninklijk Instituut voor de Taal-, Land en Tolkenkunde 

 van Xederlandsch-Indie " (VGravenhage) and entitled " Adat- 

 Techtbundel." 



The comparative method has helped, for example, to explain 

 the line yang bersemp, yang berjerami which puzzled the authors 

 of " Eenibau; " it has proved that for their impossible bersa-orangan 

 the Minangkabau word persaarangan (common enough in Xegri 

 Sembilan) should be restored; it has shown us that for gemok ber- 

 pupoJc on p. 39 of Mr. Caldecott's ^Jelebu" should be read gemok, 

 di-pergepokkan. 



It may be said that textual points are of dilettante interest. 

 Well, the comparative method helps also to reveal how funda- 



Jour. Straits Branch R. A. Soc, No. 78. 



