Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/106

94 receives a suffix, e.g., -an, the tenuis remains and no media appears, the result is lautan, "ocean", and similarly in all the other cases. The evidence to which we must now have recourse is furnished by the formative process that has created disyllabic word-bases out of monosyllabic roots. We find in Old Jav. a root rug, which is used by itself without any further extension (i.e. after the fashion of kan in § 51) as a word, with the meaning of " devastated ". Mal. also possesses this root, though not as an independent word, but only as a con-stituent embodied in disyllabic word-bases. When it is com- bined with a prefixed element, the media g is a final, and must therefore change into the tenuis; but if the root is linked with a sufiixed element, the media appears in the interior of the word and is preserved. Thus we get, on the one hand, Mal. buruk < bu + rug, " to fall to bits ", and on the other, rugi < rug + i, "to damage". —Other Mal. examples: sigi, "to dig with the fingers", beside Old Jav. sisig, "to rub with the fingers", tubi, "to persevere in a thing", beside the Old Jav. tub, which has the same meaning.—These word-bases rugi, sigi and tubi, therefore, tell us that the Mal. of the Malay Peninsula in an earlier phase of its development tolerated the mediae at the end of words.

Note.—The element -i, which occurs in rugi, is a very common phenomenon; it serves both to form word-bases out of roots, and also to give a further extension to word-bases (see § 156). The element bu- only serves to make word- bases out of roots, and it is of rarer occurrence; therefore we will add a parallel: From the root way, "to rock to and fro", Old Jav. forms a-way, "to wave", and Tag. has bu-way, "to see-saw".

66. The same kind of evidence as has been given for Mal. can also be produced in the case of certain languages of Sum-atra, e.g. Karo, Toba and Mkb.' Old Jav., for instance, has a word-base anteg, "to arrive at", with a root teg; Toba has