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PART II
'ORIGINAL INDONESIAN
178. We saw in § 1 that the word laṅit, either unchanged or modified only in conformity with strict phonetic law, runs through a number of IN languages. How do we account for that fact ? By the assumption that there was once a uniform original IN language, which possessed the word laṅit, and from which its offshoots, when they parted away from it, took the word with them.
179. Having in § 2 styled the word laṅit “Common IN” , we now call it “Original Indonesian” , and we also apply this epithet to all the linguistic phenomena which in Part I have been pronounced to be Common IN.
180. It is self-evident that this Original Indonesian also went through a process of evolution: when we speak of the Original IN mother-tongue in this monograph we are referring to its last phase, immediately before its subdivision.
181. Indo-European research also speaks of an original mother-tongue, though with more reserve nowadays than formerly: see Meillet-Printz, p. 17, and compare therewith Porzezinski-Boehme, p. 198.
182. In the field of IN research the conditions are more favourable to the hypothesis of a common original mother-tongue. That, surely, has been proved by the whole of our dissertation on Common IN. But we will single out a few particularly striking points.
183. The several IN languages, although they extend over such an enormous area, are more closely related together than the Indo-European ones. We may illustrate that fact, for example, by the case of the numerals. We give here the numerals 1-10 of the four most outlying regions.
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