Baba Malay Dictionary. William Gwee Thian Hock
Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., with editorial offices at 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12 Singapore 534167.
Copyright © 2006 The Peranakan Association, Singapore
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8048-3778-1
ISBN-10: 0-8048-3778-3
ISBN: 978-1-4629-1300-8 (ebook)
First edition, 2006
Printed in Singapore
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dedication to
MY LATE PARENTS
my father, Gwee Peng Kwee and mother, Seow Leong Neo
MY FAMILY MEMBERS
my wife Rosie Tan Chwee Neo, elder son Andy Gwee Boon Kheng, younger son Randy Gwee Boon Kim, his wife Caroline Lee Kim Sweet; their son, my grandson, Marc Gwee Eng Meng, and their daughter, my granddaughter, Joan Gwee Eng Neo.
May you always continue to use the Baba language
HE BABA PERANAKAN COMMUNITY
all Babas and Nyonyas
contents
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w-z
introduction
the historical origin of the Baba community probably began with the arrival from China of exclusively male migrants to Malacca around the early 17th century. These early Chinese migrants foresaw the need to acquire a working knowledge of the Malay language, the lingua franca of the day, before they could contemplate a firm footing in any form of livelihood. Before long, they succeeded in their quest and had gained sufficient proficiency in Malay to enable them to indulge in wholesale and retail trades, and, for some of them, to set up permanent homes with indigenous women of Malay stock as their spouses.
At home, they communicated in a language they had developed — one made up of an admixture of commonly used Malay words combined with Hokkien Chinese dialect words because the migrant-settlers had mostly come from the Hokkien-speaking part of China. Being unschooled in either literary Malay or Chinese, they were naturally only familiar with the oral tradition of these languages. Therefore, in the language they created, a large number of Malay words were absent in their vocabulary and words of Hokkien origin which had been incorporated into their dialogue were limited and confined mainly to terms not normally found or associated with the Malay home and society. This then was the mother tongue they passed on to their children and descendants.
As time went by, when members of such families became more numerous, they developed into a community—the Baba community — where the individual male became known as the Baba and the female, the Nyonya or Nonya. The term Baba also denotes Babas and Nyonyas collectively. The need to take Malay women as wives soon ceased as there were by then sufficient candidates from within their own community. Sharing a parallel development, Indian male migrant settlers in Malacca of about the same era also married Malay women and subsequently formed the Chetty Malacca or Malacca Chitty community, which shares many aspects of their culture with that of the Babas. Intermarriages