Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/155

Rh above all, the interests of Indo-European and general linguistic study. I will explain that by an example. The IN languages of the Philippines have a copula, which links the subject with the predicate, and has the form ay, or i, or ya. So the passage near the beginning of the Tagalog version of "Wilhelm Tell": "The boy fell asleep ": reads aṅ bata i naidlip. There are, however, certain cases in which the copula is omitted, e.g. where Tell says to Johannes Parricida: "Stand up!" = Stand + up you = tumindig kayo. Now the appearance of the copula is a linguistic phenomenon which is characteristic from the point of view of IN and interesting for the Indo-European student, and therefore I shall speak of it in Section IX; but the limitations of its use are of much less importance, and accordingly I shall say nothing about them. If it should appear that any part of this monograph has been expressed too concisely, the defect can easily be remedied : I shall simply expand such portion into an additional monograph.

9. Amongst the numerous IN languages I have chosen the following for the basis of my delineation:

Philippines: 1. Bontok. — 2. Tagalog.

Northern Celebes: 3. Tontemboan.

Central Celebes: 4. Bareqe.

Southern Celebes: 5. Makassar. — 6. Bugis.

Borneo: 7. Dayak.* — 8. Basa Sangiang.

Java: 9. Old Javanese. — 10. Modern Javanese.

Islands towards New Guinea: 11. Kamberese. — 12. Kupangese.

— 13. Bottinese. — 14. Masaretese.

Sumatra: 15. Minangkabau. — 16. Toba. — 17. Karo. — 18. Gayo. — 19. Achinese.

Islands at the back of Sumatra: 20. Mentaway. — 21. Nias.

Malay Peninsula: 22. Malay.

Madagascar: 23. Hova. — 24. Old Malagasy, i.e. the more archaic dialect of Ferrand's texts, which is indeed related to Hova but nevertheless independent of it.

10. Justification of the choice of these twenty-four languages. — The reason why I selected just these languages