In Taipeng five dialects of Chinese are spoken, and Chinamen constantly
communicate with each other in Malay, because they can't understand
each other's Chinese. They must spend large sums on opium, for the
right to sell it has been let for 4,000 pounds a year!
Mr. Maxwell tells me that the Malay proverbs are remarkably numerous
and interesting. To me the interest of them lies chiefly in their
resemblance to the ideas gathered up in the proverbs of ourselves and
the Japanese.*
[*Mr. Maxwell has since published a paper on Malay proverbs in the
Transactions of the Straits branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. I have
not been able to obtain it, but I understand that it contains a very
copious and valuable collection of Malay proverbial philosophy.]
Thus, "Out of the frying-pan into the fire" is, "Freed from the mouth
of the alligator to fall into the tiger's jaws." "It's an ill wind that
blows nobody good," is, "When the junk is wrecked the shark gets his
fill." "The creel tells the basket it is coarsely plaited" is
equivalent to "The kettle calling the pot black." "For dread of the
ghost to clasp the corpse," has a grim irony about it that I like.
Certain Scriptural proverbial phrases have their Malay counterparts.
Thus, the impossibility of the Ethiopian changing his skin or the
leopard his spots is represented by "Though you may feed a jungle-fowl
off a gold plate, it will make for the jungle all the same." "Casting
pearls before swine" by "What is the use of the peacock strutting in
the jungle?" "Can these stones become bread?" by "Can the earth become
grain?" "Neither can salt water yield sweet," by a very elaborate
axiom, "You may plant the bitter cucumber in a bed of sago, manure it
with honey, water it with molasses, and train it over sugar cane, but
it will be the bitter cucumber still," and "Clear water cannot be drawn
from a muddy fountain."
Some of their sayings are characteristic. In allusion to the sport of
cock-fighting, a coward is called "a duck with spurs." A treacherous
person is said to "sit like a cat, but leap like a tiger;" and of a
chatterer it is said, "The tortoise produces a myriad eggs and no one
knows it; the hen lays one and tells the whole word." "Grinding pepper
for a bird on the wing" is regarded as equivalent to "First catch you
hare before you cook it." "To plant sugar-cane on the lips" is to be
"All things to all men." Fatalism is expressed by a saying, "Even the
fish which inhabit the seventh depth of the sea sooner or later enter
the net." "Now it is wet, now it is fine," is a common way of saying
that a day of revenge is not far off.
