Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/143

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ESSAY II
131

adduce the Old Jav. as evidence, but that was merely because we wished to let the other languages of the Javanese region, which includes Bali and Madura as well, have their say too. Let us just make special mention of one item in the general agreement between Old Jav. and Common IN, or Original IN, viz. the phonetic type of the word. Old Jav. possesses the tive common vowels and in addition to them the pépét; in the interior of a word it tolerates the kapkap type of consonantal combination; at the end of a word it admits any consonant save the palatals, thus tolerating the mediæ: and these are also the chief characteristics of the Original IN type of word.[1] — Modern Jav. has departed much further from Original IN. For example, it has turned part of its pépéts into another sound, it has given up the sulu-suluṅ type of reduplication, its passive with the formative -in- is in the act of dying out, etc.

187. Of the earlier phases of Mlg. and Bug. there are also documentary records available, though they are far less important than the Old Jav. ones. Here too we observe that the earlier phases approach more closely to the Original IN than do the modern forms of these languages. Thus in § 44 we worked back from the modern Mlg. zama to iama, and the latter form really occurs in Houtman, p. 360. And in the Old Bug. epic La-Galigo there is an expression, no longer in use nowadays, viz. amesorěṅ, "a place where one can lie down ". In § 26 we had occasion to regret that the word sor runs through only a few languages; in Old Bug. amesorěṅ < a + me + sor + ěṅ we have a fresh piece of evidence in support of it.

188. The sum total of the linguistic facts which we have shown to be Common IN and now call Original IN is quite a considerable quantity. It is true that beside these there are a good many linguistic phenomena which we could only style Common IN with hesitation, or not at all. But that is not to say that they cannot be Original IN. Bim. on the Eastern Border has a word wara, " to be, to be found somewhere ",

  1. [See also Essay IV, §§ 3, 6, 8.]