Page:A dictionary of the Sunda language of Java.djvu/189

168 the flames, and the dove may be the emblem of their „Triumphant husbands” who have preceded them to bliss.

In Malay they say Marapati, for a dove, Marsden 322 which name answers to the same office of the Dove being let fly at the funeral burning. Mara, C. 519, Māra, C. 1538. Death, dying. Pati, C. 355, Lord, master; and thus Mara-pati- Death's Lord, still emblematic of the sacrifice of herself which the widow is about to commit. Both the Malay and Sunda people appear thus to have given the Dove its name, from the fact of its being used at the Suttee or self-sacrifice of a widow on the death of her husband. The words have evidently been received from the Hindus. In the case of the Malays they adopted the word Marapati, Death’s Lord, and of the Sundas, they adopted Japati, the „Triumphant Lord.”

In Malay also the Dove is called „Burung Dara”, and in Javanese „Manuk Doro.” Dara, C. 266 is a wife, and thus the Malay and Javanese words mean „the wifes bird” — which still applies to the wife sacrificing herself at the funeral pile of her husband. The word Dara is still preserved in Sunda, and as can be seen means — „a young woman who has just got her first child” In Malay — Marsden 128 — it means — „a virgin, a maiden” — and Dara-dang, a damsel, so that in Malay the original meaning has been somewhat modified.

It is not a little remarkable that Indian and Sanscrit names should, in the Eastern Archipelago, have superseded Polynesian names, for neither in Malay, Sunda nor Javanese, does there now thus exist a pure Polynesian name for so common an object as the domestic Dove.

The name thus applied to the Dove is not in all probability, the common colloquial name in Sanscrit. Clough gives for Dove Parawiya, Paréyiya; wild pigeon Kobo, Kobéyiya. Lambricks Singhalese vocabulary gives Kobéyiya the small Dove, Parawiya, the Pigeon; Babagoya, the Dove; Mayilagova, the large Dove. So that the names which have been transplanted into the Polynesian languages from the Sanscrit, are the mystic names applied to the Dove when used at the Suttee of widows. In the Tijdschrift voor Indische Taal- Land- en Volkenkunde, 1853 Page 2 of Berigten, Mr. Friederich explains the word Marapati for dove as the „Lord of Death” in reference to the custom still in use on Bali of letting fly a dove from the head of the widow at the moment she plunges into the gulf of fire, and explains that on Bali this bird is called Titiran, wichwhich [sic] is the same as the Perkutut of Batavia and of the Sunda districts, and thus not the common domestic dove. Whatever may now be the case as to the bird so let loose, there can, from what has been said above, exist no doubt that that bird was originally the common domestic dove.

With respect to Mr. Friederich's interpretation of Burung-Darah a bird of blood,