instrumentLek char

เหล็กจาร · lek chan

The iron stylus: the pen that writes on palm leaf, sharpened for skin

What it is

The northern instrument: an iron stylus of the kind used to incise palm-leaf manuscripts, taken to skin.

The long version

The word char (จาร) is the verb for writing on a palm leaf with a stylus — scoring the surface and rubbing soot into the score so the letters appear. The same word, the same tool family, and in the north the same people: the men who could write the letters were the men who could put them on a body.

Inference — that overlap explains something about the region's tattooing that a picture of a tiger does not. A Lanna yant is a written document. The tool is a pen, the surface is a person, and the fee has the same name as a teacher's fee because the transaction is a teaching one.

Notes

Ten pages of the manuscript corpus this site counted carry the word เหล็กจาร. None of them is a tattooing manual; they are about writing.

Connected to

• Sak kha lai What it made.
• Khem sak The same tool under the name the tattooers use.
• tua mueang The letters it was made to write.

Named here by

• Sak kha lai The instrument.
• Hnitkwasok The same idea, one border east, and lighter.
• Khem sak Its older name in the north.
• What the word means first Write.

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