Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XI.djvu/65

MALAYO-POLYNESIAN RACES AND LANGUAGES 57 !y tricks on their enemies. They are easily excited to religious emotions, and their rich store of legends testifies to the vivacity of their imagination. The Javanese are the most cul- tured among them, and evince capacity for a jh degree of intellectual development. (For e peculiar customs of the various races, see e articles descriptive of their habitats.) LANGUAGES. The Malayo-Polynesian languages form an independent group, unconnected with other. They are derivatives of an extinct mitive form of speech, which suffered three four dialectical variations before it had ined its complete development. They do possess the same grammatical structure roughout, but only agree more or less in the tern of sounds, the general form of the ver- roots, and the main principles of grammar, degree of development the Polynesian lan- guages stand lowest; the Micronesian and Me- lanesian are a step higher ; and the Malayan, and especially the Tagala languages, occupy the highest rank. The known languages of the eastern or Polynesian division are the idiom of the Marianas or Ladrones, which forms the connecting link with the Malayan languages ; the languages of the Feejee, Annatom, Erro- mango, Tanna, Malikolo, Mare, Lifoo, Baladea (New Caledonia), Bauro, and Guadalcanal* isl- ands, which are all more or less closely related ; and the Maori, the language of New Zealand, with its kindred languages of the Tonga, Raro- tonga, Tahiti, Hawaiian, and Marquesas islands. Of the western or Malayan division, there are known in the Philippines the Tagala of the south of Luzon, the Pampanga of the south- west, the Ilocana and Bicol of the southeast, the Ybanag of the province of Cagayan, the Bisaya spoken on several islands south of Luzon, and the Zebuana on Cebu and the adjacent islands. Closely related to them are the languages of Formosa, of which the Favorlang and Sideia dialects are best known. Three dialects are known of the Malagasy, or language of Mada- gascar, viz. : the Ankova dialect, spoken by the Hovas in the interior of the island, the Betsimisaraka dialect of the east, and the Saka- lava dialect of the west. The Malay language proper, which is in extent and in regard to its literature the first among the whole group, is spoken on the Malay peninsula and the adja- cent islands, and on the coasts of Sumatra. Two dialects may be distinguished in it, the Malacca and the Menankabow or Padang. Be- sides these dialects, a literary or choice lan- guage is employed by the Malays. Several au- thors divide the various modes of speech ac- cording to castes : bahdsa ddlam, the language of the court ; bahdsa bansdvan, that of the edu- cated classes ; bahdsa ddgah, that of merchants and traders ; and the bahdsa Tcatiikan, that of the common people. The Malay language pos- sesses a large and varied literature, the begin- nings of which date back to the 13th century A. D., and which is especially rich in poetical works, legendary narratives, Mohammedan the- ology, jurisprudence, chronicles, travels, and various paraphrases of Indie epics. Besides the Malay proper, there are several minor lan- guages spoken on Sumatra, as the Batak in the interior of the northern portion of the island, and the languages of the Rejang and the Lam- pong in the south. Javanese is spoken on Java and several adjacent islands, and stands in importance next to Malay, but its literature reaches back to the 1st century of our era. (See JAVA, LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF.) ' Closely related to Javanese is the Sunda lan- guage, spoken on the western portion of Java. Of the languages in Borneo, that of the Dyaks is well known; according to the missionary Hardeland, it has four dialects. The Dyaks have not produced a written literature, but they possess a number of ancient songs com- posed in a peculiar and only partly intelligible language, which they call basa sanian or the language of the good beings, i. e., the spirits of their ancestors. The Bughis and Mankasar (Macassar) languages, spoken in Celebes, have also been investigated. The statement above made that these languages form an isolated family of speech is in accordance with the la- test researches of Friedrich Miiller, on whose elaborate treatise on the Malayo-Polynesian languages in the Eeise der osterreichischen Fre- gatte Novara, : Linguistischer Theil (Vienna, 1867), and excellent ethnological account of the races in his Allgemeine Ethnographic (Vienna, 1873), this article is based. Bopp, in the Ab~ handlungen der Berliner Akademie (1840), is not of the same opinion. He holds the Malayo- Polynesian languages to be a branch of the Aryan or Indo-European family, and direct descendants of the Indie group. He drew his conclusion from the fact that the Malay and Javanese languages contain a large amount of Sanskrit elements, which however do not be- long to the original stock, and were gradual- ly incorporated, as both history and the ab- sence of Indie forms in the Polynesian lan- guages amply testify. Max Miiller has taken still another view of the relation which these languages hold to other families of speech. In Bunsen's " Christianity and Mankind " he attempts to establish that the Malayo-Polyne- sian languages form a member of the great so-called Turanian family, and that they are especially closely related to the Tai languages. He says : " A language which shares so many grammatical principles in common with Khamti and Siamese, and differs from Sanskrit on every essential point of grammar, can no longer be counted as a degraded member of the Aryan family, however great the authority of him who first endeavored to link Sanskrit and Malay to- gether." Friedrich Miiller has a satisfactory argument in the above cited work to show that the seeming similarities of several grammatical forms in the Tai and Malayo-Polynesian lan- guages do not warrant us in considering the lat- ter a derivative group of the former. Numbers constitute one of the highest linguistic tests of