Crawfurd's 1822 'Malay of Champa'
By Graham Thurgood, California State University
ABSTRACT
In 1822 John Crawfurd, a medical doctor and British civil servant, published as a column in the appendix of a book an 81-item wordlist with the heading Malay of Champa , a designation that is essentially geographical. The existence of the list immediately brings up several basic questions: What language is it? That is, if it is Chamic, precisely which Chamic language is it? Once the language is identified, what can we learn from examining the wordlist? That is, what reliable information does it give us about that language in 1822? In addition, there are a number of minor queries about how to interpret Crawfurd s transcription.
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