Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/347

Rh MALAYS 325 exchanging his own for his child s name ; counting by numeral auxiliaries, such as pebble, chief, log, mountain, feather, &c., according to the nature of the object. 1 The race is on the whole of a sluggish intellect, inferior in natural intelligence even to tjie surrounding Papuan populations. Dr Montano tells us that in the girls school at Malacca, conducted by the Roman Catholic sisters, the Chinese children take the first, the Mantras (aborigines) the second, and the Malays the last place in order of capacity. 2 Unaided by foreign influences they never attained a higher culture than that of the &quot; Sea Gipsies&quot; ; and for their letters, most of their arts, and their religions they are in debted either to the Hindus or the Arabs. (A. H. K.) Malay Language and Literature. The Malay language is a member of the Malayan section of the Malayb-Polynesian class of languages, but it is by no means a re presentative type of the section which has taken its name from it. The area over which it is spoken comprises the peninsula of Malacca with the adjacent islands (the Rhio-Lingga Archipelago), the greater part of the coast districts of Sumatra and Borneo, the seaports of Java, the Sunda and Banda Islands. It is the general medium of communication throughout the archipelago from Sumatra to the Philippine Islands, and it was so upwards of three hundred and fifty years ago when the Portuguese first appeared in those parts. There are no Malay manuscripts extant, no monumental records with inscriptions in Malay, dating from before the spreading of Islam in the archipelago, about the end of the 13th century. By some it has been argued from this fact that the Malays possessed no kind of writing prior to the introduction of the Arabic alphabet (W. Robinson, J. J. de Hollander) ; whereas others have maintained, with greater show of probability, that the Malays were in possession of an ancient alphabet, and that it was the same as the Rechang (Marsden, Friederieh), as the Kawi (Van der Tuuk), or most like the Lampong (Kern), all of which alphabets, with the Battak, Bugi, and Macassar, are ultimately traceable to the ancient Cambojan characters. With the Mohammedan conquest the Perso- Arabic alphabet was introduced among the Malays ; it has continued ever since to be in use for literary, religious, and business purposes. &quot;Vhcre Javanese is the principal language, Malay is sometimes found written with Javanese characters ; and in Palembang, in the Menangkabo country of Middle Sumatra, the Rechang or Renchong characters are in general use, so called from the sharp and pointed knife with which they are cut on the smooth side of bamboo staves. It is only since the Dutch have established their supremacy in the archipelago that the Roman character has come to be largely used in writing and printing Malay. This is also the case in the Straits Settlements. By the simplicity of its phonetic elements, the regularity of its grammatical structure, and the copiousness of its nautical vocabu lary, the Malay language is singularly well-fitted to be the lingua franca throughout the Indian archipelago. It possesses the five vowels a, i, u, e, o, both short and long, and one pure diphthong tin. Its consonants are k, g, iig, ch, j, ii, t, d, 11, p, b, m, y, r, I, ic, s, h. Long vowels can only occur in open syllables. The only possible consonantal nexus in purely Malay words is that of a nasal and mute, a liquid and mute and vice versa, and a liquid and nasal. Final k and h are all but suppressed in the utterance. Purely Arabic letters are only used in Arabic words, a great number of which have been received into the Malay vocabulary. But the Arabic charac ter is even less suited to Malay than to the other Eastern languages on which it has been foisted. As the short vowels are not marked, one would, in seeing, e.g., the word bnfng, think first of bintang, a star ; but the word might also mean a large scar, to throw down, to spread, rigid, mutilated, enceinte, a kind of cucumber, a redoubt, according as it is pronounced bantang, banting, bcntang, buntang, luntung, bunting, bonteng, bcnteng. Malay is essentially, with few exceptions, a dissyllabic language, and the syllabic accent rests on the penultimate unless that syllable is open and short; e.g., datang, namana, besar, diumpatkanfialah. Nothing in the form of a root word indicates the grammatical cate gory to which it belongs ; thus, Icasih, kindness, affectionate, to love ; ganti, a proxy, to exchange, instead of. It is only in deriva tive words that this vagueness is avoided. Derivation is effected by infixes, prefixes, affixes, and reduplication. Infixes occur more rarely in Malay than in the cognate tongues. Examples are (juruli, a rumbling noise, gumuruh, to make such a noise ; tunjuk, to point, telunjuK, the forefinger ; cJiuchvk, to pierce, chcruchitk, a stockade. The import of the prefixes me (meng, men, men, mem), pe (peng, pen, pen, pern), ber(bel), per, pel, ka, di, ter, and affixes an, kan, i, lah will best appear from the following examples :-root word ajar, to teach, to learn ; mengdjar, to instruct (expresses an action) ; Mlajar, to study (state or condition) ; mengajari, to instruct (some one, trans.) ; mengdjarkan, to instruct (in something, causative) ; pengdjar, the instructor ; ptldjar, the 1 Col. Yule, in Jour. Anthrop. Soc. for February 1880. 2 Jour, d Anthropologie for March 1882. learner ; ptngajdran, the lesson taught, also the school ; p&ajaran the lesson learnt ; didjar, to be learnt ; terdjar, learnt ; ttrdjarkan taught ; tfrcy ari, instructed ; [pfrfy a (from raja, prince), to recce- g by turns ; similarly there are forms like ajar-mtngajar, Mrdjar- ajdran, djar-ajdri, mgmpSrdjar, mcmptrdjarkan, mZmperajari, terbeldjarkan, ptrbglfy arkan, &c. Altogether there are upwards of a hundred possible derivative forms, in the idiomatic use of which the Malays exhibit much skill. See especially H. von Dewall, Ik, great simplicity and indefiniteness. There is no inflexion to dis tinguish number, gender, or case. Number is never indicated when the sense is obvious or can be gathered from the context; otherwise plurality is expressed by adjectives such as sagdla, all, and bdfiak, many, more rarely by the repetition of the noun, and the indefinite singular by sa or satu, one, with a class-word. Gender may, if necessary, be distinguished by the words laki-ldki, male, &quot;and pZrampdan, female, in the case of persons, and ofjantan and IHlna in the case of animals. The genitive case is generally indicated by the position of the word after its governing noun. Also adjectives and demonstrative pronouns have their places after the noun. Comparison is effected by the use of particles. Instead of the per sonal pronouns, both in their full and abbreviated forms,-conven- tional nouns are in frequent use to indicate the social position or relation of the respective interlocutors, as, e.g., hamba tuan, the master s slave, i.e., I. These nouns vary according to the different localities. Another peculiarity of Malay (and likewise of Chinese, Shan, Taking, Burmese, and Siamese) is the use of certain class- words or coefficients with numerals, such as orang (man), when speaking of persons, ckor (tail) of animals, kfying (piece) of flat things, biji (seed) of roundish things ; e.g., lima biji telor, five eggs. The number of these class-words is considerable. Malay verbs have neither person or number nor mood or tense. The last two are sometimes indicated by particles or auxiliary verbs ; but these are generally dispensed with if the meaning is sufficiently plain without them. The Malays avoid the building up of long sentences. The two main rules by which the order of the words in a sentence is regulated are subject, verb, object ; and qualifying words follow those which they qualify. This is quite the reverse of what is the rule in Burmese. The history of the Malays amply accounts for the number and variety of foreign ingredients in their language. Hindus appear to have settled in Sumatra and Java as early as the 4th century of our era, and to have continued to exercise sway over the native popula tions for many centuries. These received from them into their language a very large number of Sanskrit terms from which we can infer the nature of the civilizing influence imparted by the Hindu rulers. Not only in words concerning commerce and agriculture, but also in terms connected with social, religious, and administra tive matters, that influence is traceable in Malay. See W. E. Maxwell, Manual of the Malay Language, 1882, pp. 5-34, where this subject is treated more fully than by previous writers. This Sanskrit element forms such an integral part of the Malay vocabu lary that in spite of the subsequent infusion of Arabic and Persian words adopted in the usual course of Mohammedan conquest it has retained its ancient citizenship in the language. The number of Portuguese, English, Dutch, and Chinese words in Malay is not considerable ; their presence is easily accounted for by political or commercial contact. The Malay language abounds in idiomatic expressions, which con stitute the chief difficulty in its acquisition. It is sparing in the use of personal pronouns, and prefers impersonal and elliptical diction. As it is rich in specific expressions for the various aspects of certain ideas, it is requisite to employ always the most appro priate term suited -to the particular aspect. In Maxwell s Manual, pp. 120 sq., no less than sixteen terms are given to express the different kinds of striking, as many for the different kinds of speak ing, eighteen for the various modes of carrying, &c. An unneces sary distinction has been made between High Malay and Low Malay. The latter is no separate dialect at all, but a mere brogue or jargon, the medium of intercourse between illiterate natives and Europeans too indolent to apply themselves to the acquisition of the language of the people ; its vocabulary is made up of Malay words, with a conventional admixture of words from other languages ; and it varies, not only in different localities, but also in proportion to the individual speaker s acquaintance with Malay proper. The use is different as regards the term Jam as applied to the Malay. language. This has its origin in the names Great Java and Lesser Java, by which the mediaeval Java and Sumatra were culled, and it accordingly means the language spoken along the coasts of the two great islands. Malay is probably spoken with greatest purity in the Rhio- Lingga Archipelago and in the independent states of Perak and