Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/140



PART II

'ORIGINAL INDONESIAN 178. We saw in § 1 that the word laṅit, either unchanged or modified only in conformity with strict phonetic law, runs through a number of IN languages. How do we account for that fact ? By the assumption that there was once a uniform original IN language, which possessed the word laṅit, and from which its offshoots, when they parted away from it, took the word with them.

179. Having in § 2 styled the word laṅit “Common IN”, we now call it  “Original Indonesian” , and we also apply this epithet to all the linguistic phenomena which in Part I have been pronounced to be Common IN.

180. It is self-evident that this Original Indonesian also went through a process of evolution: when we speak of the Original IN mother-tongue in this monograph we are referring to its last phase, immediately before its subdivision.

181. Indo-European research also speaks of an original mother-tongue, though with more reserve nowadays than formerly: see Meillet-Printz, p. 17, and compare therewith Porzezinski-Boehme, p. 198.

182. In the field of IN research the conditions are more favourable to the hypothesis of a common original mother-tongue. That, surely, has been proved by the whole of our dissertation on Common IN. But we will single out a few particularly striking points.

183. The several IN languages, although they extend over such an enormous area, are more closely related together than the Indo-European ones. We may illustrate that fact, for example, by the case of the numerals. We give here the numerals 1-10 of the four most outlying regions. Rh