Page:A Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language with a Preliminary Dissertation- Dissertation and Grammar, in Two Volumes, Vol. I (IA dli.granth.52714).pdf/19

 the ideas which they express, consider them the most amenable to adoption of any class of words whatsoever. Accordingly, such words will be found, either to have supplanted native terms altogether, or to be used as familiar synonymes along with them, Thus, to give some examples in Malay; the most familiar words for the head, the shoulder, the face, a limb, a hair or pile, brother, house; elephant, the sun, the day, to speak, and to talk, are all Sanskrit. Jo Javanese we have from the same Sanskrit, the head, the shoulders, the throat, the hand, the face, father, brother, son, daughter, woman, house, buffalo, elephant, with synonymes from the hog and dog, the sun, the moon, the sea, and a mountain. In the language of Bali, the name for the sun in most familiar use is Sanskrit, and a word of the same language is the only one in use for the numeral ten. It is on the same principle that I account for the existence of a similar class of Malayan words in the Tagala of the Philippines, although the whole number of Malayan words does not exceed one fiftieth part of the language. Head, brat, hand, finger, elbow, hair, feather, child, sea, moon, rain, to speak, to die, to give, to love, are examples. In the Maori, or New Zealand, the words forehead, sky, ghat, stone, fruit, to drink, to die, are Malay or Javanese, yet of these two tongues there are not a hun- dred words in the whole language. As to the personal pronouns, which have often been referred to as evidence of a common tongue, in as far as concerns the language under examination,” they are certainly the most interchangeable of all classes of words, aud cannot possibly be received as evidence. Some of them, for example, are found in the Polynesian dialects, where, in a vocabulary of five thousand words, a hundred Malayan terms do not exist. The numerals must surely be considered as out of the category of early-invented words, for they imply a very considerable social advancement, and seem to be just the class of words most likely to be adopted by auy savages of tolerable natural capacity. The Australians are not savages of such capacity, and although with the opportunity of borrowing the Malayan numerals, they have not done so, and, in their own languages, count only as far as “ two.”

The words which appear to me most fit to test the unity of