Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/20

 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS OF METHOD.

6. The first indispensable requirement for the success of a work like the present is that it should be built up entirely on the basis of phonetic law. In former monographs the present writer, instead of appealing to phonetic laws, often had recourse to parallel instances, and that alternative may have sufficed for those cases. But here he will expressly formulate all the phonetic laws that may come into question.

This is perhaps a convenient place for stating summarily the two chief phonetic laws affecting IN vowels and consonants respectively. They are to be found in fuller form in the present writer's previous monographs, and the second one in particular detail in Brandes' "Bijdrage".

I. The pĕpĕt-law. Original IN ě remains ě in some languages, as in Old Jav. and Karo; in others it becomes a, as in Mak. and Mkb.; in others again e, as in Day.; in others i, as in Tag.; and finally in others o, as in Toba and Bis.

II. The R-law. Original IN had two shades of the r sound. In several IN languages, for instance in Karo, these have been unified again into a single kind of r. In others the differentiation has developed further. Thereby the one kind of r has become g in certain languages, as in Bis.; in others it has become h, as in Day.; in others again this h has disappeared, as in Old Jav. The other kind of r sometimes persists as r, sometimes it appears as l or as d.

7. The second indispensable condition consists in this, that the material should be surveyed in its entirety. That is the case here, for the present writer has in the course of years

Rh