Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/158

 146 popular kind; they are therefore precisely such as a student of language desires. The exceptions are the Tag., Old Jav. and Old Mlg.* texts, whose inclusion must accordingly be justified.

I. The Tag. translation of Tell is by Eizal. To everyone who knows the name of Rizal the idea will at once suggest itself that this translation must contain the purest and most genuine Tag.

II. The Old Jav. literature, or so much of it as has been published up to the present time, is in the highest sense a product of conscious art, dependent in a great measure on the ancient Indian literature. This relation of dependence is reflected by the word-store of Old Jav., which displays a large percentage of ancient Indian loan-words. The Rāmāyaṇa begins with a characterization of considerable length, wherein the "epitheta ornantia" are for the most part Sanskrit words, the native ones being pretty well confined to rĕṇön, "renowned", dumilah, "brilliant", and māsih, "kindhearted". — But this alien element has only affected the vocabulary; morphology and syntax, and therefore also the character of the verb, have hardly been modified in the slightest. The same is true of the foreign element in other IN languages, as the researches on that subject, e.g. those of Van Ronkel, have shown. — Accordingly we shall not only use the Old Javanese texts without scruples, but shall also find them to be the most fruitful of all texts for our purpose.

III. The Old Mlg. texts display much the same character as the Old Jav.; they contain a fairly considerable quantity of Arabic loan-words, but for the rest their inclusion may be justified by the same argmnents as have been used concerning the Old Jav. texts.

13. Some IN dictionaries give such lengthy illustrative quotations in support of the words they explain, that they may be said to amount to complete, though short, texts. This may be seen, for example, in Aymonier and Cabaton's