The Malay name of the tapir is tenok (تنق) and what we should expect would be that the writer, who was of course describing an animal that was quite new and unknown to his readers, would endeavour to render this word in the ideographs of the language in which he was writing. What we should expect him to say is "in the mountains of this country a supernatural" (or, perhaps, rather, "extraordinary") animal is found called the tenok.
And this is, I venture to suggest, what the author has actually written.
Searching through the various dialects of the Chinese language for a dialect in which 神鹿 will represent the sound tenok, we find that in the Hylam dialect 神 is pronounced "tin" whilst in the groater number of the other dialects it is "sin" or "shin."
The Hylam dialect would therefore appear to be indicated 鹿 however remains "lok" as in the Mandarin dialect. We therefore get "tin-lok," which, though it takes us a good part of the way, is not entirely satisfactory. I am informed however by the Chinese interpreters of the Supreme Court that there is no ideograph which represents the word "nok." It would therefore appear either that 鹿 represents the nearest sound possible in the Chinese language to the Malay word tenok, or else that, in A. D. 1416, it was pronounced "nok."
The passage in the Ying-yai Shêng-lan is interesting in more than one respect. Firstly, if my suggestion that these two ideographs represent the word tenok is correct, it shows that the writer of that work was a Hylam; a native, that is to say, of the Island of Hainan, a fact which both the geographical position of that island with regard to the countries mentioned in the account, and the skill and daring in navigation of its inhabitants render extremely probable.
I am more inclined to believe the writer of the Ying-yai Sheng-lan to have been a Hylam from the passage in the work where, also in an account of Sumatra, he gives (according to
