Kuala Pilah – Seremban route

I OVERHEARD A CONVERSATION BETWEEN TWO MEN ON A BUS YESTERDAY...

The two men were actually sitting on the rear steps of the bus, and I was seated about a meter away from them so I could hear them well. It was late in the evening but the bus was full with people wanting to go back to the city. Most people decided to remain quiet, perhaps still thinking of the weekend’s fun at home, but these two men decided to make friends:

Duduk sini saja uncle
Sini boleh ka? Oklah
Uncle kerja mana?
Saya kerja kontrak KL, you?
Saya kerja Nilai
Apa buat Kuala Pilah?
Saya ada kawan sini. Uncle kerja apa?
Saya kerja kontrak bina rumah. Renovation.
Saya pun bina rumah
You buat apa? Sapu cat ka?
Macam-macam, uncle sudah lama kerja?
Sudah lama, syarikat kecik saja dalam 8 orang, lu kerja company besar ka?
Besar juga ada dalam 20 orang
Ooo itu besar punya
Lu orang mana? Indonesia ka?
Saya orang Sarawak, Kuching
Sana banyak balak, bukan?
Ya, getah pun ada juga
So, you tau banyak pasal kayu, itu jati, setang
….
Setang, orang panggil setang
….
Akasia
Akasia, itu boleh buat kertas
Baik buat kertas, kayu banyak lembut, jati orang tanam banyak jugak, kawan saya tanam 80 hektar Kuala Pilah, senang hidup
Tapi kena baja kalau sudah banyak ekar, uncle
Ya, tanah pun kena baik
Ya, mesti sejuk

This conversation continued for a while until we neared Bukit Putus and the “Kuching” man decided to stand up, perhaps he was getting dizzy from the meandering bus ride.

What's in a name? [I am not an arab]

The flora of Malaya has fascinated many people, including some of the world's greatest naturalists. The colonial botanists/ foresters' attitudes toward vernacular names of our forest-related resources were originally positive, and words such as belukar, lopak, utan and countless native plant names were used alongside the scientific (or international to borrow E.J.H Corner's term) names. It is difficult to find the exact date when the hindi-derived 'jungle' became disused, and the french-derived term 'forest' became more 'correct' but one person, Corner, did retain the use of 'jungle' in his third edition of the Wayside trees of Malaya, published in 1988.

Back then 'ethno-botany' was not even a recognised (or created) research field, but the early colonial botanists/foresters were doing it! Someone recently suggested that an ethno-botanist is a non-native person studying a locality's flora--so by his definition I am not an ethno-botanist when I study the plants in my kampung even though I'm employing the techniques of 'ethnobotany' or 'western scientific botany'.

Sometime during the previous century it became unfashionable to use vernacular names of plants when studying or classifying them! This happened (and still does) in the scientific fields of plant ecology and botany. The rationale for this seemingly 'reverse-xenophobic' decision is that local people classify plants differently from ecologists/botanists--the former may focus more on the uses of plants, therefore those plants that have uses are given specific names, sometimes more than one name per plant. For instance, the enau palm; its sap, which can be made into sugar or toddy, is known as nigho anau, whereas its fruits are called buah belulok in the villages of Negeri Sembilan. The plants that do not have local uses are, otherwise, lumped into a 'category' of lifeforms, such as aka or ghumput.

The ecologists/botanists, on the other hand, divide plants based on their physical appearance--the shape of fruits, flowers, the many parts of fruits and flowers, the shapes of leaves...and so each plant is named accordingly, although some stupid/sychophantic/self-important individuals have chosen to name plants after some humans. These names are given in latin, the language of the learned europe once upon a time but is now effectively restricted to the Vatican and the field of organismal systematics!

Actually the villagers of Negeri Sembilan (and in other places) do use 'appearance' as a basis of naming. For example, pokok buah kotolir kambing, is a name given to a tree that has fruits resembling the penis of a goat! In a sense, these local people are more in tune with their plants than the foreign botanists/ecologists ........

And guess what the folks in Negeri Sembilan call the cute-looking passiflora.....