Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/22

10 the literary language.—In a few cases some other languages besides these will also be used.

11. Fifthly, though not an absolute necessity, it will be a great convenience for our enquiry if we introduce the idea of the Original Indonesian mother-tongue as an auxiliary factor. Of this Original IN two features are of especial importance to our enquiry, viz., the phonetic system and the general type of words.

I. The phonetic system of Original IN :

The ě is the rapidly pronounced, indeterminate vowel, styled after the Jav. manner "pěpět"; q represents the hamzah, the glottal stop; many scholars, e.g. the two Adriani's, denote it by a symbol like the apostrophe, as also does Sievers ("Phonetik", § 353). I It has already been observed in § 6 that there were two shades of r in Original IN.

Some of the living languages have evolved sounds which were unknown to Original IN: thus Mlg. possesses the sonant sibilant z ; in Gayo there is an ö, which according to Hazeu sounds pretty much like the German ö in "hören"; in several Philippine languages and also in Bimanese we find f, as appears from the dissertations of Conant and Jonker.