Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 2.djvu/107

POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES. ^ 89 taking the following singular and various shapes. In Malay it is bras, in Sunda bias, in Bali bahas, in Bugis werasa, in Macassar berasa, in Sainang bayas, and in Dayak balms. Some of the more eastern languages demand euphonic rules peculiar to themselves. It seems adverse to their genius that any word should end in a consonant, with the exception of the soft nasal ng. It seems equally adverse to the genius of their pronunciation that one consonant should coalesce with another. It is in consequence of this that we sometimes see a vowel added or intervened, a terminating conso- nant rejected or commuted for the favourite nasal ; so that we have, on this principle, bulan, the moon, converted in Macassar into bulang ; kilat, lightning, in Macassar and Bugis into kila ; guntur, thunder, into gunturu ; and, with some more violence biiriy dew, into apung. This variety of orthography and pronunciation may be contrasted with the singular uniformity of a word made up of what I may call the favourite sounds of the East- Insular languages, which for the vowels are broads, and Italian w, a, and iy and for the consonants n, k, t, s, p, g and ng. In words where these sounds prevail the uniformity is surprising. Maize is for instance cdXledijagung unalterably in every language of the Indian islands that I have heard of; a board is with equal uni- formity papan, the sky langit, the earth tanah, and the eye mata*