I've been wondering lately about the meaning of the name 'Gunung Merapi', which in English translates to 'Mount Merapi', the still-active volcano in Central Java. Many people say it literally means 'Fire Mountain' in Indonesian or Javanese.
The trouble is, in modern Indonesian, the word for a volcano is gunung berapi. Notice the ber~ prefix before the base word api. This ber~ in this context means roughly 'to have'; thus, a mountain with fire.
Replace the ber~ prefix with another important prefix, me~, and following the conventions for adding prefixes to base words, the base word api dictates that the me~ prefix become meng, thus giving mengapi. Mengapi means 'to fan a fire' or 'to act like / take on the form of fire'. The other possibility is that the prefix is in fact me~ and that the base word is rapi. But this no longer means anything to do with 'fire' but rather being tidy. Except that, there is no word merapi in Indonesian. There is merapikan which requires the 'causative' ~kan prefix meaning 'to tidy up'.
So the other possibility is that it is Javanese. Still, in my study of modern Javanese, there is no prefix me~ and thus no Javanese word merapi. Nor is there a Javanese prefix mer~ and thus still no Javanese word merapi.
The only other possibilities are -
a) Gunung Merapi does not in fact mean 'fire mountain', at least not in modern Indonesian or Javanese.
b) Gunung Merapi is from an older form of Javanese, perhaps Kawi or even Sanskrit.
Interestingly, the volcano next to Merapi, Merbabu, also appears to begin with the same mer~ prefix, leading me to speculate that it is an ancient Jawa Kuno, Kawi, or Sanskrit thing.
If anyone can shed some light on this, I'd be very grateful.
More than once it crossed my mind, how strange it is that some places in w sumatra for example have such Indonesian sounding names, when the local Minangkabaunese language /sounds/ so far removed.
ReplyDeleteIn Europe it would be like a german name for a mountain in ireland.
Maybe I'm just not knowledgeable enough about the languages, but I've seen this all over the place...
John,
ReplyDeleteYes, the origin of names I come across in Indo often fascinates me. In the case of Merapi it certainly appears to be a Javanese borrowing from Sanskrit - mer meaning mountain; nothing out of the ordinary actually given the history of Hindu influence in the archipelago.