Two of the three translations attempt to explain the significance of the name. There are three different Japanese versions accessible on the Internet.īecause Japanese has a tradition of representing foreign words in katakana, it is possible to get away with just representing the pronunciation of ‘Penang Lawyer’, a practice that all three adopt, with slight differences in transliteration. And I was a huge Holmes fan in my childhood I still have my two-volume Collected Stories from back then. I love everything about this: the phrase itself, the dueling explanations, and the “Chinese whispers” translations. This may not be totally worthy of an LH post, but apart from being interesting in itself, I’m intrigued at the possibilities for straying from the original meaning in other languages. This kind of wood is produced in Penang its name is Penang wood (or perhaps ‘Areca wood’, since 槟榔 means Areca). The only other translation I have got hold of is an online Chinese version, which translates the offending phrase in a pedestrian way as: In Mongolian it is translated as ноцтой баримт, meaning something like “serious facts”. I checked the Mongolian translation (which is from the Russian, not the English), and found myself in a game of Chinese whispers. Lo and behold, “Penang lawyer” is translated as веским аргументом ! The translator seems to have adopted an interpretation closer to the second one in Wikipedia. The first paragraph of a Russian translation available online goes: It’s not a very complicated one, but what piqued my interest was how translators have dealt with this strange name. Licuala acutifida is the source of cane for the walking stick nicknamed the Penang-lawyer by colonials, probably from the Malay phrase pinang liyar for a wild areca, although the term may also refer to the use of these canes as deadly knobkerries to assassinate litigious enemies. But Wikipedia at its article on Licuala also offers an alternative explanation: This suggests a fanciful misinterpretation of the Malay pronunciation. A kind of walking stick made from the stem of an East Asiatic palm ( Licuala acutifida). When I looked it up the answer was quite straightforward: I had no idea of the origin of this name: colonial as it appeared to be, I could not think of any way that lawyers from Penang would be particularly noteworthy within the Empire. The expression that caught my eye was “Penang lawyer”. “To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.,” was engraved upon it, with the date “1884.” It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry–dignified, solid, and reassuring. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a “Penang lawyer.” Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I started reading the Hound of the Baskervilles (which you no doubt know was written by Arthur Conan Doyle) and came across a curious expression in the very first paragraph:
![sonority plateaus sonority plateaus](https://image.slideserve.com/493186/test-nasal-onsets-l.jpg)
This e-mail from Bathrobe is self-explanatory, and he’s given me permission to quote it verbatim, so I will: