Indonesian? Short Sword for Comment

[A. G. Maisey]

I guess if this pedang were Sundanese, rather than Javanese , we could perhaps call the hilt a ceker kidang style, but I don't think this name is used in Jawa, at least I've never heard it used in Central Jawa, and in Javanese the combination of "ceker" --- a claw, a chicken leg, a hand --- together with "kidang" --- a small deer --- sounds pretty peculiar.

It sounds queer to me, but I'm not a native speaker of Javanese, so I ran it past a couple of native speakers of Javanese, and it didn't wash with them either.

In Sundanese "ceker" means the foot of a little animal, and in Indonesian it can mean either "foot" or "claw".

I feel that perhaps the name "ceker kidang" might be Jakarta in origin.

[naturalist]

Most of my office mates are Sundanese, since my office is in Bogor, West Java. I took this opportunity to ask them what is "Ceker". For them, ceker is referring to chicken feet (all are younger than me, i don't know how deep they are into their culture). However, i found that in some parts of Betawi communities around Jakarta Province (Betawi who are living in West Java, but close to Jakarta), ceker also has meaning as the feet of ungulate.
In Javanese, the verb form of ceker is ceceker it means looking for food (as the chicken do to look for something on the ground using their feet or what we are doing for living-connotation). Javanese also use cekeran/nyeker to describe a situation when we (humans) are in bare naked feet. We (Javanese) do have a rude form of it, it is "cokoran/nyokor". So, as in some communities in West Java that are using ceker not only for chicken leg, Javanese also use ceker in a broad meaning.
I did pass the pictures above to my colleagues, all said the handle is "ceker kidang".

Anton

[Interested Party]

It does look like the profile of a deer's foot.