their own way easier, or because they think it more elegant. They have no difficulty in sounding the letters b and l, but instead of ambil they say ambek or even amek, and for tinggal one sometimes hears tinggek. Final ai is always toned down to e and au to o, as sunge and pulo for sungai and pulau. Final h is never sounded at all, so that rumah becomes ruma, bodoh is bodo, and boleh is bole; thus they make no distinction between the sound of final ai and eh, both being e to the Baba. On the other hand final a is generally sounded as ak, and sometimes final i becomes ik: thus instead of bapa, bawa and pula, we have bapak, bawak and pulak. These corruptions of the sounds of the final letters cause a great deal of confusion in some words; for instance the Babas always pronounce chari as charik or charek, and have no idea that this is quite a different word, and means to tear; there is also a similar confusion between bawa, to bring, and bawah, below. The Babas also frequently drop the h in the middle of a word, as baru for bharu, saja for sahaja, saya for sahya; and they have a slight tendency to drop the h at the beginning of a word, as in the words hati, hanyut, etc. The Malays sometimes fail to sound initial h, but they never fail to sound the final h, and sometimes go so far as to carry the over to the beginning of the next word, as rumah horang, tlah hada, etc. Other corruptions can hardly be class- ified, so it is best to give a few examples at random, for instance, bergitu for bgitu, ktawa for tertawa, rti for arti, kreja for kerja, piara for plihara, pegang for pgang, sumpit for spit (chopsticks), mnimpi for mimpi, kmantin for pngantin, smunyit for smbunyi. Words of Arabic origin are generally corrupted more than pure Malay words, for example, pe'da for fa'idah, jerki for rzki, akérat for ákhirat, masohor or mersohor for mashhur.
4. The Baba idiom is Chinese rather than Malay.
Perhaps the most striking peculiarity in the way that the Babas make up their sentences is the very frequent use of the pos- sessive particle punya, which they use precisely as the Hok-kiens use the particle ê; but punya being a longer word is much more cumbersome, and produces awkward sentences, thus, "Dia punya mak-bapa ada dudok makan di sblah punya meja." Such phrases as "tiga bulan punya lama," "sperti macham itu punya kreta," are in constant use, and sound ludicrous to a Malay. These senten- ces are all taken from the writings of the Babas themselves. Here is another typical sentence, "Ini macha m punya orang fikir apa yang banyak salah ta'patut buat, dan apa yang sdikit salah boleh buat. Apa punya bodoh satu fikiran ini?" The redundancy of the "punya" is not, however, the only peculiarity of this sentence, the writer of which, though he is unable to speak Chinese, has given us a very close approximation to the Chinese idiom, and the whole sentence is absolutely unlike anything that a Malay would say. In the first place such expressions as ini macham and apa
