Jawa Keris for ID

[A. G. Maisey]

Obviously I could not.

Over time the differences in appearance soaked in & it became second nature to know, or more likely to feel, what I was looking at.

Music again:- how can we listen to and repeat a piece of music if we are not familiar with music?

There are various scales in music:-

https://pulse.berklee.edu/scales/index.html

it can be a little bit amusing to listen to somebody who is not familiar with pentatonic scales trying to hum a tune that is expressed in a pentatonic scale. That person might have been listening to music in chromatic scales from birth, but his ear is just not attuned to the different sounds of the pentatonic, so he often has difficulty in trying to repeat what he has heard, or rather what he thinks he has heard.

I probably should add a comment on the various types of ivory.

I am not an ivory expert & that is the reason I refer to "marine ivory" rather than "whale tooth". There is also walrus ivory that is sometimes used in keris hilts, apparently it found its way into SE Asia through the hands of whalers, as did also whale tooth, but throughout the Archipelago the indigenous people also hunted whales, or sometimes a whale would beach itself, & the people who lived nearby would take parts of the whale for use.

Then we have vegetable ivory, tagua nuts, but these are not nearly big enough to carve a hilt from, although they are sometimes big enough for small components such as a buntut or a pommel. If I were to be given a small piece of marine ivory & a small piece of tagua nut, I could not tell one from the other, but I could probably differentiate both from a small piece of elephant ivory, especially so if schreger lines were present.