A Manual of the Malay language With an Introductory Sketch of the Sanskrit Element in Malay

Dialectical peculiarities are so abundant in Malay that it is impossible to teach the colloquial language of the people without imparting to the lesson the distinct marks of a particular locality. In parts of India it is said proverbially that in every twelve kos there is a variation in the language,[1] and very much the same might be said of the Malay Peninsula and adjacent islands. The construction of the language and the general body of words remain, of course, the same, but in every state or subdivision of a state there are peculiar words and expressions and variations of accent and pronunciation which belong distinctively to it. Words common in one district sound strangely in another, or, it may be, they convey different meanings in the two places. Even words of such constant occurrence as the personal pronouns "I" and "you" vary according to locality. The Kedah accent is easily distinguished from that of Patani, and that again from the speech of Trengganu and Pahang. Certain expressions common in Penang are almost unintelligible in Malacca and Singapore, and vice versâ. In Perak it is not difficult to say whether a man comes from the upper or lower reaches of the river, by merely noting particular words in his conversation. Even individual villages and districts have their peculiar twang or their tricks of expression not found elsewhere. In Java, Sumatra, and other islands eastward in which Malay is spoken, the pronunciation and character of the language are much influenced by the other languages current there. Malay is only spoken in perfection in places where the natives speak no other tongue.

[Footnote 1: Beames, Comparative Grammar of the Aryan Languages, p. 101.]

Native pedantry has endeavoured to classify various styles of speaking, as the court style (bahasa dalam), the well-bred style (bahasa bangsawan), the trader's language (bahasa dagang), and the mixed language (bahasa kachau-kan), but all that can be correctly said is, that a limited number of words are used exclusively in intercourse with royal personages; that persons of good birth and education, in the Eastern Archipelago, as elsewhere, select their expressions more carefully than the lower classes; and that the vocabulary of commerce does not trouble itself with the graces of style and the copious use of Arabic words which commend themselves to native writers.

The written language is more stilted and less terse and idiomatic than the colloquial dialect; and even where pure Malay is employed, the influence of Arabic compositions is very marked. Whole sentences, sometimes, though clothed in excellent Malay, are unacknowledged translations of Arabic phrases. This may be verified by any one well acquainted with Malay literary compositions who will look into a really good translation of an Arabic work; for instance, Lane's translation of the "Thousand and One Nights." The Malay speaks much better than he writes, and has at his command quantities of words which never find their way into his literature, and, therefore, but rarely into dictionaries compiled by Europeans.

The spelling of Malay words in the native character is hardly yet fixed, though the Perso-Arabic alphabet has been in use since the thirteenth century; and those follow but a vain shadow who seek to prescribe exact modes of spelling words regarding which even native authorities are not agreed, and of which the pronunciation may vary according to locality. The experience of Crawfurd sufficiently proves this; there are words in his dictionary which are transliterated in as many as four different ways.

Two classes of works in his own language have hitherto been at the service of the English student of Malay--grammars, more or less scientifically arranged, and vocabularies and books of dialogues, which presuppose some knowledge of grammatical construction.

The Malay Grammar of Marsden is an admirable work, of unquestionable utility to the advanced student; but it contains more than the beginner wants to know. Crawfurd's Malay Grammar, too, is hardly a work to put into the hands of a beginner.

Mere vocabularies, on the other hand, teach nothing but words and sentences, and throw no light upon forms of construction.

It has been my aim to supply a work which will be at once an elementary grammar and a compendium of words and sentences, which will teach the colloquial dialect and yet explain grammatical rules; and for this I have taken as my model the Hindustani Manual of the late Professor Forbes.

The language is not ennobled by having been the speech of men who have made their mark in the world's history. The islands of Indonesia have never startled the Eastern world with an Akbar, or charmed it with a Hafiz or a Chand. Receptivity, not originality, is the characteristic of the Malay races. But the importance of Malay, when the traveller heads eastward from the Bay of Bengal, has been recognised by Europeans since the sixteenth century, when Magellan's Malay interpreter was found to be understood from one end of the Archipelago to the other. It is the strong and growing language of an interesting people, and (in the words of a recent writer on Eastern languages) "for Malay, as for Hindustani, a magnificent future may be anticipated among the great speech-media of Asia and of the world. They manifest that capacity for the absorption and assimilation of foreign elements which we recognise as making English the greatest vernacular that the world has ever seen."[2]

[Footnote 2: Cust, Modern Languages of the East Indies, 150.]

W. E. M.

THE RESIDENCY, LARUT, PERAK, July 1, 1881

INTRODUCTION.

The interest of Englishmen in the Malay language began with the early ventures of the East India Company in the Far East, in the first years of the seventeenth century. It was the language of commerce everywhere east of the Bay of Bengal, and our earliest adventurers found it spoken at the trading ports which they visited. The Portuguese had preceded them by a century, and the Dutch had been a little earlier in the same field. Our countrymen seem to have been indebted to the latter for their first Malay vocabulary. The minutes of the East India Company record how, on the 22d January 1614, "a book of dialogues, heretofore translated into Latin by the Hollanders, and printed with the Malacca tongue, Mr. Hakluyt having now turned the Latin into English, and supposed very fit for the factors to learn, was ordered to be printed before the departure of the ships."[1]

[Footnote 1: Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, East Indies, p. 272.]

At present the use of Malay, as far as Englishmen are concerned, is chiefly confined to the officers of the Colonial Government in the British possessions in the Straits of Malacca and in the native states adjoining them, and to other residents in those parts, and in the Dutch settlements in the East. To these may be added the English communities of Labuan and Sarawak, and merchants, traders, and seamen all over the Eastern Archipelago. The limited extent of our Malay possessions, when they are compared with the magnificent islands which make up Netherlands India, excuse us, no doubt, for the secondary place which we occupy in all researches connected with the language and literature of the Malays. To the Dutch their colonies in the Eastern seas are what our Indian Empire is to us; and with them the study of Malay, Javanese, Kawi, &c., takes the place of Persian, Hindustani, Tamil, Sanskrit, &c., which occupy our civilians in India. The extent and value of Dutch works on Malay subjects is, however, but little known to Englishmen in the East, owing to their general ignorance of the Dutch language. It is not too much to say that any one aiming at a thorough knowledge of the language, literature, and history of the Malay people should commence his task by learning Dutch.

Malay is the language not of a nation, but of tribes and communities widely scattered in the East, and is probably spoken with greatest purity in the states of Kedah and Perak, on the west coast of the Malay Peninsula. It is spoken in all the states of the Peninsula, in Sumatra, Sunda, Java, Borneo, Celebes, Flores, Timor, and Timor Laut, the Moluccas, and the Philippines. Traces of it are found among the numerous Polynesian dialects, and in the language of the islanders of Formosa. Siam proper has a large Malay population, descendants mainly of captives taken in war, and the language is therefore in use there in places; it is found also here and there on the coasts and rivers of Anam and Cochin-China. No other language of the Eastern Archipelago is understood over such an extensive area, and it is the common means of communication between the numerous tribes and races of the Malay family whose languages and dialects differ.

Logan supposes that the earliest inhabitants of the Archipelago were tribes of Africo-Indian origin, who peopled the Eastern islands as well as the more accessible portions of the Continent, descendants of whom he recognises in the negro and quasi-negro tribes that are still preserved in some of the mountains of the Malay Peninsula, Siam, and Anam. To these succeeded immigrant tribes from Mid-Asia, by way of the Irawadi, whom Logan designates by the term of the Tibeto-Anam family, all the races and languages from Tibet to Anam being included under it. "By a long-continued influx this family spread itself over the Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and Celebes; but its farther progress over the many islands to the north and east appears to have been checked by the older races. It was probably only by slow steps and by settling at many points that it gained a firm footing even in the western islands, and a long period must have elapsed before its tribes became so populous and spread so far into the interior as to enable them to absorb and destroy the earlier occupants."[2] The variety which exists among the languages and dialects in the region affected by these movements is thus accounted for by Logan:-- "The languages imported by the Tibeto-Anamese settlers differed as did those of the natives, and the combinations formed in different places from the contact of the two families varied in the proportions of each which entered into them. But the structures of the native tongues had strong affinities amongst themselves, and predominated in all these new combinations."[3]

[Footnote 2: Journ. Ind. Arch., iv. 311.]

[Footnote 3: Idem, p. 315.]

The idea presented by this sketch of the origin of the aboriginal Malay language is that of a mixed dialect, borrowing something from the Tibeto-Anam languages (the influence of which would be more apparent in the western settlements), and gradually approaching the Africo-Indian forms farther east.[4] "Lastly," Logan supposes, "a later Indian influence, belonging to a far more advanced civilisation, flowed in a great stream into the Western Archipelago, and cut off that of the Irawadi, before its linguistic operation had made much progress."[5] It is to this epoch that we must ascribe the introduction of the Sanskrit element into the Malay language.