Roman character has come to be largely used in writing and printing Malay. This is also the case in the Straits Settlements.[1]
By the simplicity of its phonetic elements, the regularity of its grammatical structure, and the copiousness of its nautical vocabulary, the Malay language is singularly well-fitted to be the lingua franca throughout the Indian archipelago. It possesses the five vowels, a, i, u, e, o, both short and long, and one pure diphthong au. Its consonants are k, g, ng, ch, j, ñ, t, d, n, p, b, m, y, r, l, w, s, h. Long vowels can only occur in open syllables. The only possible consonantal nexus in purely Malay words is that of a nasal and mute, a liquid and mute and vice versa, and a liquid and nasal. Final k and h are all but suppressed in the utterance. Purely Arabic letters are only used in Arabic words, a great number of which have been received into the Malay vocabulary. But the Arabic character is even less suited to Malay than to the other Eastern languages on which it has been foisted. As the short vowels are not marked, one would, in seeing, e.g., the word bntng, think first of bintang, a star; but the word might also mean a large scar, to throw down, to spread, rigid, matilated, enecinte, a kind of cucumber, a redoubt, according as it is pronounced bantang, banting, bentang, buntang, buntung, bunting, bonteng, benteng.
Malay is essentially, with few exceptions, a dissyllabic lan- guage, and the syllabic accent rests on the penultimate unless that syllable is open and short e.g., dátang, namáña, běsár, diumpatkanñálah. Nothing in the form of a root word indi- cates the grammatical category to which it belongs; thus, kāsih, kindness, affectionate, to love; ganti, a proxy, to exchange, instead of. It is only in derivative words that this vagueness is avoided. Derivation is effected by infixes, pre- fixes, affixes, and reduplication. Infixes occur more rarely in Malay than in the cognate tongues. Examples are—gūruh, a rumbling noise, gumūruh, to make such a noise; tunjuk, to point, telunjuk, the forefinger; chūchuk, to pierce, cherūchuk,
- ↑ No. The Roman character has not yet been adopted in the Straits Settlements, either in the Government Vernacular Schools, or by the Native Press. Ed.
