June 5, 1926 |
"Tuan Panjan" |
Tuan is Malay for “owner, master, sir”; panjang means “long” in standard Indonesian but in eastern Indonesian dialects (where local languages sometimes do not distinguish the direction of length) the same word is used for both “long” (horizontal length) and “tall” (vertical length). Thus this phrase should be translated “the tall gentleman” (or more precisely, in this colonial environment, “the tall White Man”). |