Concerning longkang and kolam

Kain dalam achar: Kutip cuci ia nak masuk ke dalam longkang juga.

You may pick out an old garment from the scrapheap and you may clean it, but it will want to go back into the cesspool all the same. See Wilkinson (1901), p. 5. The use of achar was restricted only in northern Malay states. It is probably a corrupted form of kachara कचरा (garbage). A phenotypical opposite was also given by Wilkinson: Laksana intan manikam jatuh di longkang. Tak hilang cahaya (p. 601): Like diamonds and pearls which do not lose their lustre even if they fall into a cesspool; characters which the worst surroundings cannot degrade.

你降下甘霖，灌透壟溝， 滋潤壟背，使地鬆軟、 長出莊稼。

. . . τοὺς αὔλακας αὐτῆς μέθυσον πλήθυνον τὰ γενήματα αὐτῆς ἐν ταῖς σταγόσιν αὐτῆς εὐφρανθήσεται ἀνατέλλουσα . . . Saturating its furrows (αὔλακας), leveling its ridges, You cause it to rejoice in the overflow of moisture, You bless its growth . . . Psalm 65:10. Given the Chinese version, a Malay translation could look like: Semoga longkangnya disirami, bendangnya dibasahi, hasil tanamannya bertambah banyak; di dalam titisan airnya, ia akan bersukacita ketika tumbuh.

Longkang لڠکڠ is a Hokkien loanword used primarily in the southern Malay states. It represents the Malay approximation of 壟港 or 隴港 (longkang). The glyph 壟 combines the phonetic element 隆 (lóng) and the semantic element 土 (tǔ, earth), conveying the meaning of raised or elevated earth. An alternative form, 隴, replaces the earth component with 阝, the highly stylized form of 阜 (fǔ), which denotes a man-made structure. The second character, 港, is composed of the water radical 氵 and lane/passage 巷 (xiàng), suggesting a waterway or channel. Taken together, longkang 壟港 literally evokes water lanes along raised earth, that is, irrigation channels constructed to regulate and distribute water to crops planted on ridged fields.

A mini version of longkang is longkau 壟溝. It has always been the term I use to refer to drainages until I was stopped by my primary school teacher, likely acting on behalf of a certain committee in the Ministry of Education (e.g. the predecessor of Chinese Language Standardization Council of Malaysia 馬來西亞華語規範理事會 and expert like Yeoh Sim Joo 楊欣儒), corrected the class for using the barbaric term, and preferring instead the term 水溝. For many years, I accepted her judgment as correct, until I realized that her act of forcefully replacing a southern term with a more refined northern one was itself equally arbitrary, if not barbaric.

Suppose that the area of the white square is \(x^2\), and the area surrounding it is depressed and filled with water. If \(a_i\) is significantly larger than \(x\), then the water body is a kolam, otherwise it is a longkang (e.g. the moat surrounding Angkor Wat, Cambodia and the Forbidden City of the Purple Tenuity Star, Beijing). When the white square is reduced to an infinitesimal size, the longkang effectively ceases to function as a channel and instead becomes a kolam, a bounded body of water.

Another related concept is kolam. Although one can easily demonstrate that longkang and kolam are mathematically equivalent, $${\rm kolam} = \lim_{{a_i}/{x} \to \infty}{\rm longkang}$$ conflating the two in everyday speech can be perceived as linguistically crude. And one can find one such example in Suffian et al. (2017), in which baray បារាយណ៍, the Khmer term for kolam, is used to describe the giant longkang around Angkor Wat.

A photograph (left) depicting the giant longkang surrounding Angkor Wat in Suffian et al. (2017): Berdasarkan gambar baray di atas, jawab soalan yang berikut: (1) Apakah kegunaan baray? (2) Apakah peranan raja untuk memajukan kegiatan pertanian? (3) Sebagai seorang pemimpin, bagaimanakah anda dapat memajukan negara? See Suffian Mansor, Mardiana Nordin, Ahmad Salehee Abdul, Ishak Saidoo (2017) Sejarah Tingkatan 2, Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Kuala Lumpur, p. 36. The photo on the left ought to be replaced by an image of the West Baray (right), a giant kolam 15 minutes away from Angkor Thom, since the textbook’s questions actually concern the large water reservoir built by Angkorian engineers and its role in stabilising the water table and supporting agriculture in the country.

In p. 62, we have: (2) Mencipta sistem pengairan: Masyarakat kerajaan Alam Melayu memiliki kemahiran mencipta sistem pengairan seperti baray dan sistem saliran untuk memastikan bekalan air mencukupi di kawasan pertanian. Oleh itu, tanaman utama seperti padi dan rempah-ratus serta tanaman sampingan dapat diusahakan sepanjang tahun. Keunikan dalam kemahiran ini merupakan warisan yang penting terhadap perkembangan ekonomi tamadun Melayu. For the photograph given on the left, the caption given by Suffian et al. (2017) is Baray bersebelahan Angkor Wat, and they claimed that the photo was taken from Charles Higham (2002) Early cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia, River Books, Bangkok, p. 320. One can indeed locate a photograph of a water body in Higham (2002) but the photograph (right) is captioned: The massive moat of Angkor Wat, seen at dusk. Here, the reference to Higham (2002) feels awkward, since the photo shown is not from Higham (2002), and they chose to describe the water body as a baray rather than a moat or longkang, contrary to Higham’s description.

Although the Malays possess a native word for longkang (i.e. parit فارت), they do not have a native word for man-made water reservoir, so they borrow kuḷam குளம் from the Tamils, reflecting linguistic borrowing shaped by long-standing contact with Pahlava and Chola cultures. The /ku/ கு sound is approximated as /ko̞/ in Malay and the word is rendered orthographically as کولم. The South Indians do have kolam கோலம் in their vocabulary, but it means a decorative floor design. The Malay word امڤڠ (empang) is sometimes used to refer to water reservoir, but this is a secondary sense that comes from its original meaning of building a barrier (the primary meaning of empang) to block or control the flow of a stream.

According to	the kolam next to Angkor Thom is called	the longkang surrounding Angkor Wat is called
the Khmer	បារាយណ៍ (barayn)	កស្សិណ (kassen)
the French	baray	douve
the English	baray	moat
the Chinese	池 (chi)	濠 (hao)
the Tamil	குளம் (kuḷam)	அகழி (agaḻi)
the MOE	baray	Also baray 😅

The French archaeologists, who conducted extensive research on Khmer civilization, were apparently able to distinguish between the longkang surrounding Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom and the giant kolam. They used the word douves (of Germanic origin, meaning ditch or pit) for the longkangs, and adopted baray, a phonetic approximation of the native Khmer term for kolams.

When Peter Harris (2007) translated Zhou Daguan's description of water bodies in the city of Angkor, he was also apparently able to differentiate longkangs from kolams.

. . . 城之外皆巨濠，濠之外皆通衢大橋 . . . 東池在城東十里，周圍可百里，中有石塔、石屋 . . . 北池在城北五里，中有金方塔一座，石屋數十間 . . . Around the outside of the city walls there is a very large moat. This is spanned by big bridges carrying large roads into the city . . . Ten li east of the city wall lies the East Lake (East Baray). It is about a hundred li in circumference. In the middle of it, there is a stone tower with stone chambers. . . . Five li to the north of the city wall lies the North Lake (Jayatataka Baray). In the middle of it is a gold tower, square in shape, with several dozen stone chambers (Neak Pean) . . .

Let us now turn to the locals. The longkang around Angkor Wat? The locals call it kassen កស្សិណ and not baray បារាយណ៍. Thus anyone who blindly follows Suffian et al. (2017) and calls it a baray is likely to be corrected by a local Cambodian (or even by students who learned the correct terms frome teachers who do not rely on the MOE-approved textbook). I find it difficult to understand why any Ministry of Education would provide incorrect information to its students, effectively setting them up embarrassment abroad.

The longkang around Angkor Wat? Khmers call it kassen កស្សិណ, not baray បារាយណ៍. If you blindly repeat what the MOE says and call it a baray, a local will correct you faster than you can say “oops.”

The Forbidden City of the Purple Tenuity Star 紫禁城 in Beijing. The width of the Chinese longkang, however, is only about \(\frac{1}{4}\) of that of their Khmer counterpart.