A Malay-English dictionary,

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In this apparent conflict between the evidence of words
and that of racial features it is only necessary to avoid
too sweeping inferences. The Malays are admittedly a
very mixed people. They may owe the basis of their
language to only one of the many elements which go to
make up their race. In the struggle forlinguistic existence,
the Oceanic type of language still shows extraordinary
vitality. The descendants of Chinese, Arabs, and Indian
settlers in the Peninsula, even where they outnumber the
true Malays, adopt the speech of the country with the
addition (perhaps) of a certain number of their own words
but without materially modifying its ideology or structure.
It may well be that the original Malays themselves
abandoned some speech of their own for the language of
the Indonesian races who preceded them in the possession
of Sumatra. It may also be that those Indonesians owed
the basis of their speech to a still earlier Melanesian race.
The principal feature of the Oceanic type of language
is the fact that it seems to be dissyllabic and vocalic, or,
in other words, that the primitive word consists of two
syllables and that each syllable ends with a vowel. It has
sometimes been suggested that the absence of final
consonants is due to the softness and languor which affect
islanders dwelling in a tropical sea. The bearing of such
a theory upon the etymology of Malay would be to imply
that the final consonants in its words and syllables are
survivals, and that the omission of such consonants in
kindred Oceanic languages is not evidence of their
absence from the original root. A careful analysis of the
language makes it, however, appear that the syllables other
than the final syllable are vocalic, and the inference is that
the final syllable was once vocalic too. Thus, if we take
the words asin and masin, the n only represents what is
now the suffix an in Malay and the ma represents the prefix
be or mL. The root of these words would appear to be
the vocalic asi which (with the meaning of "sea") is
found in many primitive Indonesian tongues and is also
the basis of the Malay tasek.
The use of initial and final consonants to modify or
to give grammatical precision to the meaning of a word
is common to many Indonesian languages and is the
ancient practice out of which the modern system of
prefixes and suffixes has developed. The elaborate rules
regarding the formal changes in words under the influence
of these prefixes and suffixes are not ancient and are only
true (in their entirety) of the Riau-Johor dialect. The
very examples quoted in this Dictionary will show
occasional departures from the usually accepted canons
of modification; e.g., nmenyinta (from chinta), ngelana (from
kelana), ngerawat (from rawat), metarus (from terus). A
comparative study of the initial and final consonants from
which the prefixes and suffixes are derived gives the
following results:

(I) initial m or b creates an adjective;
(2) initial k creates a present participle passive;
(3) initial t marks a past participle passive;

(4)
(5)
(6)

an initial nasal sound (1g or it) makes the
verb;
initial p indicates a noun (nomen agentis);
final t helps to form the noun of state or
condition.

From these results we may infer that while the
prefixes be, p, te, and ke, and the affix an represent five
out of these six old forms, the modern verbal mctng- and
men- are really compounds of the first and fourth, and the
prefix mz (in words like mlluntcor or nmerapai) is derived
from the first (adjectival) and not from the fourth (verbal)
of these initial consonants. It thus happens that words
beginning with the letters I and r seem sometimes to have
two verbal forms; e.g., nmrapai and mnenggerapai, from
rapai, mctluichor and minggelunLchor from lutchor, and a
number of apparently new words have been coined in
this way. Similarly the prefixes pang- and pen- are
compounds of the fifth and fourth.
The subject of Malay etymology cannot be discussed
Iwith any exhaustiveness in a brief Appendix; what is
here written is of the nature of a caution against the
practice of basing etymological theories upon casual
similarities between individual words. Thus tanjong has
been stated to be derived from tanah ujong; tangan and
tanugkap have been represented as probably owing their
origin to a Sakai root tang (= hand); etc. Tanjong, with
its sense of "projection," is far more likely to be
connected with words like anjor, anjong, tajor, tajok, and
telanjor. In the same way the sense of "curvature"
runs through words like along, elok, (or lok), telok, gelong,
jflok, jcrelok, rclong, and that of "angularity" in words
like biku, siku, belikut, bengkok, beltgkong, and chengkok.
The root in such cases is not to be obtained by the
separate consideration of each syllable, but (as might be
expected from the Oceanic character of the language) is
usually made up of two vocalic syllables and is to be seen
in the central portion of most words.
The study of Malay etymology is further complicated
by the fact that many Indonesian languages have not
only had a common origin but have had relations with
each other subsequent to their differentiation into
separate tongues. Thus in words of common origin, the
Malay d is a Javanese r; e.g., dato' in Malay is rati in
Javanese, daun is ron, adek is ari. But subsequent relations
have introduced words like ratu into Malay literature so
that the two forms exist side by side. A good instance
of a double form lies in the roots udi and uri, both with
the common suggestion of "posterior"; the former root
appears in mudek, kenmtudi, keztudiyan, and the latter in
burit, buritan, uri, and buri.

APPENDIX VI.
ROMANIZED MALAY.

There are two logical systems of romanizing Malay:
the literal, which follows the spelling, and the phonetic,
which follows the pronunciation of a word.

The literal method (which has been followed by the
Dutch lexicographers) takes the various Arabic letters
and vowels or vowel-points which make up a word and

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