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/20

 languages are those indispensable to their structure, which con- stitute, as it were, their framework, and without which they cannot be spoken or written. These are the prepositions which represent the cases of languages of complex structure, and the auxiliaries which represent times and moods. If a sentence can be constructed by words of the same origin, in two or more languages, such languages may. safely be considered as sister tongues,—to be, in fact, dialects, or to have sprung from one stock. In applying this test, it is not necessary that the sentence so constructed should be grammatical, or that the parties speaking sister tongues should be intelligible to each other. The languages of the South of Europe can be written with words common to them all, derived from the Latin without the assistance of any of the foreign words which all of them contain. The common stock, therefore, from which they are derived is Latin, and they are sister tongues. English can be written with great ease with words entirely Anglo-Saxon, and without any French word, although French forms a sixth part of the whole body of its words, but no sentence can be constructed consisting of French words only. The parent stock of our language, therefore, is not French or Latin, but Anglo-Saxon. By this test the Irish and Gaelic are shown to be, virtually, the same language, and the Welsh and Armorican to be sister dialects. But it will not prove that the Welsh and Irish, although they contain many words in common, are the same language, and derived from the same source.

Applying this test to the Malayan languages it will be found that a sentence of Malay can be constructed without the assistance of Javanese words, or of Javanese without the help of Malay words. Of course either of these two languages can be written or spoken without the least difficulty, without a word of Sanskrit or Arabic. The Malay and Javanese, then, although a large proportion of their words be in common, are distinct languages, and as to their Sanskrit and Arabic elements they are extrinsic and unessential. When the test is applied to the Polynesian languages we find an opposite result. A sentence in the Maori and Tahitian can be written in words common to both, and without the help of one word of the Malayan which