Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/162

 150 = Feared s. his = metauqna ata na. In the Malay work Hang Tuah, Hang Jĕbat says: "I am not afraid to die" = Not I fear to die = tiyada aku takut akan mati. In the Hova Fable of the Donkey we find: " There was no one who did not fear him" = Not was, not feared him = tsi nisi tsi natahutra azi.

Note. — In support of the assertion that takut is Common IN I have only given illustrations from four areas of distribution, viz. the Phihppines, Celebes, the Malay Peninsula, and Madagascar. Strictly speaking, I ought to give illustrations from all the twenty-four languages, or at any rate from a majority of them, in order to convince the reader that takut really is Common IN. But that procedure would involve such an accumulation of ballast as to deprive my monograph of the character which, as stated in § 8, I wish it to have. Accordingly both here and in the following I confine myself to mentioning merely three or four of the illustrations I have collected; but in doing so I always strictly observe the precaution of quoting from languages which in each case are most remote from one another both from the point of view of relationship and also geographically, as in the present instance of Tag., Bug., Mai. and Hova.

20. We have seen above that both simple WB verbs and derived verbs can do duty as the predicate of a sentence. In most IN languages the derived verbs bulk much more largely than the others, and yet we always find alongside of them a minority of simple WB verbs. This state of things must be regarded as Common IN. Only in the languages spoken near New Guinea, e.g. in Masaretese, do I observe the reverse, viz. that the simple verbs predominate in the texts. — This statement shall be emphasized by an enumeration. In the part of the Tag. Tell, where Baumgarten relates Wolfenschiess' suggestions, all the verbs are derivative; in the passage "The castellan lies in my house" the idea of lying is replaced by that of being (i.e. being present in) and is not expressed verbally, for reasons which will be dealt with here after. In the Tontemboan Storv of the Defeat of the Antel-