Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 2.djvu/130

 112 GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE from the operation of those more general causes which tend to assimilate to such a degree, in some of their grander features, all the Insular lan- guages, there still exist coincidences and points of resemblance of so arbitrary a nature, that they could only have h^ their source in the mod ifications pro- duced by one tongue, whatever tongue that was. Before attempting to bring this directly home to the Javanese, I shall produce a few examples of the similarity to w^hich I allude. Sakti in Sanskrit means power ; in the Polynesian languages it means only supernatural power. Putra in Sanskrit means a son ; in Malay it is son of a king or prince. We shall afterwards see how it is in Ja- vanese. Laksa, one hundred thousand, is in all the languages of the Archipelago only ten thou- sand. As to similarity in corrupted orthography, this is less to be wondered at ; but, even here, we meet such examples of arbitrary pronunciation and spelling, that it is difficult not to ascribe their origin to one common source of error. We have, for example, garu^ lignum aloes, instead of agur ; rtagasari, the name of a plant, instead of nagake* sar ; kuda^ a horse, in place o£ ghora ; bataruy an avatar, instead of awatara. If w^e are to consider the Sanskrit words in the Polynesian languages as coming from one source, we must imagine that a class of words, the very existence of which implies some civilization and improvement, were derived