Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 2.djvu/58

 44i LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE tious are small portions of modern Javanese, of the vernacular language of Kalinga, of Persian, and of the languages of modern Europe, mostly Portu- guese, with a trifling portion of Dutch, and a still more insignificant one of English. After several trials, I consider, that out of 100 parts of modem Malay, the following may be con- sidered as the proportion of the various ingredients, viz. primitive Malayan ^7 parts, Polynesian 50, Sanskrit 16, Arabic 5, and the adventitious por- tions the remaining two parts. The primitive portion of the Malay contains, if I may so express it, the skeleton of the language, those portions of it which express its grammatical form ; such as the auxiliary verbs, the substantive verb, the preposi- tions generally, and always those which express the most abstract relations, or, in other words, those which represent the cases of languages complex in their form. To the same source may be referred most of the particles, with the adjectives and verbs of most frequent occurrence, representing the most useful abstract qualities or actions. The numerous class of words from the Polyne- sian language are of a more arbitrary character, and generally unconnected with the form of the lan- guage. The first dawn of civilization is to be dis- covered in this portion of the language, as instanced in the names of the numerals, of the useful plants, the useful animals, and the metals. The incur-