Page:Journal Of The Indian Archipelago And Eastern Asia Series.i, Vol.2 (IA in.ernet.dli.2015.107695).pdf/628

 syllables on the penultimate. Indeed there are hardly a score of examples in the Malay or Javanese of the accent being on the last syllable.

The system thus sketched would be sufficiently complete, if the paramount language, the Malay, had not been written, as it invaria- bly is, in an Arabian character ill suited to the purpose. The Ara- bian alphabet, imperfect in itself and even for its own particular pur- pose, is preposterous when applied to the languages of the Archipe- lago, the genius of the pronunciation of which is far more at variance with that of the Arabic than of the languages of the south of Europe. It wants eight letters which the Javanese alphabet and the Malay language have viz. c̈. ḋ. g. ṅ. ñ. and ṫ, and it supplies their place by diacritical points over their respective cognates, while it has no less than 12 which no native alphabet possesses, and which, for the most part, are unpronounceable by the inhabitants of the Archipelago. The Malays cannot pronounce most of the peculiar consonants of the Arabian language, and have a repugnance even to several of the vowels. A few only, ambitious of some literary or religious distinc- tion, ape an imitation of the Arabie pronunciation, and the multi- tude reduce the Arabic to the standard of their own enunciation, as we ourselves did in adopting the Norman-French portion of our lan- guage.

The discordance which exists between the orthography and pro- nunciation of Arabian words adopted by the Malayan nations, makes it therefore necessary, in order to preserve the one and exhibit the other, to adopt a double system for every word.

I represent in the following manner the Arabic letters which have no representatives either in the languages or alphabets of the na- tions of the Archipelago ġ. ḣ. ˙k. ḱ. l̇, l̈. ṡ. s̈. ẗ. z̈. ż. I give them in the order of the Roman alphabet, classing them with their cognate letters.

The Arabian f. as I have stated before, occurs, as a native letter, only in the languages of a few of the ruder tribes. In the more cul- tivated it is almost invariably transformed into p. The ġ mark- ed by a diacritical point is the well-known Arabian guttural called ghain, and our Northumbrian r. Its native pronunciation is simply that of g. hard. The ḣ. with a dot is the strong Arabian aspirate; and to which there is no sound equivalent in the Malay languages. The k̈. thus marked is the guttural called kha. It is the sound which is of such frequent occurrence in the Celtic and most of the