or New Zealand,—the words forehead, sky, great, stone, fruit, to drink, to die, are
Malay or Javanese, although of these two tongues there are not above a hundred m
the whole language. As to the personal pronouns, which have often been referred to
as evidence of a common tongue, in so far as concerns the languages under examination
they are certainly the moBt interchangeable of all classes of words, and. cannot,
therefore, be received as evidence. Some of them, for example, are found in the
Polynesian dialects, where, in a vocabulary of five thousand words, there are not above
a hundred that are Malayan. The numerals are clearly out of the category ot early
invented words; for they imply a very considerable social advancement, and.seem
to belong to the class most likely to be.adopted from strangers by savages ot
tolerably natural capacity and progressing in civilisation. The Australians are not
savages of this description; and, although with opportunities of borrowing the
Malayan numerals, they have not done so, and no tribe of them counts beyond two.
On the other hand, all the Polynesian nations, and even the Papuan negros ot New
Guinea, have adopted them to a greater or less.
The words which appear to me to afford the surest test of the affiliation of languages,
are those which are indispensable to their grammatical structure,—which constitute,
as it were, their frame-work, and without which they cannot be spoken or written.
These are the prepositions which represent the cases of languages of complex structure
and the auxiliaries which represent times and moods. If a sentence can be
constructed by words of the same origin in two or more languages, such languages
may be considered as sister tongues; to be, in fact, dialects of, or to have sprung from
one stock. In applying this test, it is not indispensable that the sentence so constructed
should be strictly grammatical; or that the parties speaking sister dialects
Bhould be intelligible to each other. The languages of the south of Europe can be
written with words common to them all, derived from the Latin, without the assistance
of any of the foreign words which they all contain. The common stock, there-
fore from which they are derived, is Latin; they are sister tongues, and the manner
in which they have been broken down, and made to assume their present forms, is
satisfactorily explained by Adam Smith, in his beautiful Essay on Language. English
can be written with great ease with words entirely Saxon, and without any French
word, although French forms a sixth part of the whole body of its words; but no
sentence can be constructed with words exclusively French. The parent stock
of our tongue, therefore, is Saxon, and not French or Latin. By the same test, Irish
and Gaelic are proved to be virtually the same language ; and the Welsh and American
to be sister dialects of one tongue. But it will not prove that the Welsh and
Irish are sister dialects of one tongue, although they have many words m common.
In Italian there are a few well-known passages, in which the construction is equally
Latin and Italian, notwithstanding the complexity of the one tongue and the simplicity
of the other. In our own tongue, containing a much larger proportion of
French than the southern languages do of Germanic words, passages now and then
occur in our classic writers wholly Teutonic, such as the following m the well-known
dialogue between Queen Katherine and her Secretary, m King Henry the Eighth :
11; {is overthrow heaped h appiness u p o n h im ;
F o r th en , a n d n o t till then, he felt himself.
And found th e b lessedness of being little .”
Applying this last proof to the Malayan languages, it will be found that a sentence of
Malay m be constructed without the assistance of Javanese words, or of Javanese
without the help of Malay words. Of course, either of these two languages can be
written or spoken without the least difficulty, without a word of Sanscrit or Arabic,
which stand to them in the same relation that French does to English, or Geiman
to the languages of the south of Europe. The Malay and Javanese then, although
a large proportion of their words be in common, are distinct tongpes and not sister
dialects But when we apply the test to languages of the South-Sea Islands spoken
by the brown-complexioned, lank-haired race, we find an opposite result. A sentence
in the Maori or New Zealand, and the Tahitian, can be written in words common to
the two, and without the help of one word of the Malayan, which they contain;
iust as a sentence of Welsh and Armorican, or of Insh and Gaelic, can be construed
without a single word of Latin; although,' of this language, all of them contain
a much larger proportion than the Polynesian tongues do of Malayan words.
After as careful an examination as I have been able to make of the many languages
involved in the present inquiry; and duly considering the physical and
geographical character of the wide field over which they are spoken, with the
social condition of its diversified inhabitants, I come to the conclusion, that the
words which are common to so many tongues have been chiefly derived from the
languages of the two most civilised and adventurous nations of the Malayan Archi
^T h is c o n c i s i o n is^ertainlyli^accordanee with what we know of the manner in ^ i c b
foreign languages have been intermixed with vernacular ones in other parts of the
world It is the way in which Greek came to be intermixed with the languages of
ancient Italy; Latin with those of Southern Europe the Teutonic language with the
latter Latin with the Celtic tongues, Arabic with the languages of Central Asia and of
some paris of Europe, Persian with the languages of Hindustan and Sanscrit with these
as well as with the languages of . the countries between Hindustan and China, and those
of the Indian Islands. In these cases, the strange languages have found their way by
various means,—sometimes by colonisation or settlement, _ sometimes by conquest
and settlement, and sometimes through the agency of religious conversion. In the
case of the Malay and Javanese languages, the intermixture seems to have been chiefiy
effected through settlement originating in commercial intercourse, and not, impro bably,
sometimes in buccaneering expeditions. Independent of their superior civilisation
the grounds for fixing on the Malay and Javanese nations as the instruments of the wide
diffusion of language under consideration, are :—that when we have the earliest authentic
information of the Indian Islands through the arrival of the Portuguese, they
alone were found conducting the whole carrying trade their adventures extending
from the Peninsula and Sumatra to the Moluccas and Philippines ; that the language
of one of them was then everywhere the medium of intercommunication; that
colonies of one or the other were found in various parts of both Archipelagos; and,
above all, that their languages may be distinctly traced, not only m all the tongues o
those Archipelagos, but also in the language of Madagascar, and m the dialects oi the
islands of the Pacific. Of the general prevalence of the Malay trade and language
throughout both Archipelagos, before the arrival of Europeans, we have the most unquestionable
evidence. By means of a Malay interpreter in the fleet, the companions
of Magellan were everywhere understood in the Philippines by all parties concerned
in trade with strangers, although not by the mass of the people. This same language
served them afterwards in Borneo and the Moluccas. De Barros tells us that in
Sumatra and the Moluccas it was the only medium of communication between difierent
tribes/ Speaking of the last of these, he says : “ Two facts give reason to believe that the
inhabitants of these islands consist of various and diverse nations. The first is the
inconstancy, hatred and suspicion with which they watch each other ; and the second,
the great variety of their languages; for it is not with them as with the Bisayans,
where one language prevails with all. The variety, on the contrary, is so great, that
no two places understood each other’s tongue. Even the pronunciation diners
widely, for some form their words in the throat : others at the point of the tongue ;
others between the teeth ; and others in the palate. If there be any tongue through
which they can understand each other, it is the Malay of Malacca, to which the
nobles have lately addicted themselves since the Moors have resorted to them for the
clove.”—Decade in. Book v., c. 5. . « .
The proportion of Malay and Javanese to be found in the languages with which
they are intermixed, varies with the facilities or difficulties of communication, between
the Malay and Javanese nations and the other tribes. Generally, the proportion
is greatest towards the western part of the Archipelagos and diminishes as we recede
from them. A few examples may be given. In a thousand words of the Lampung,
a language of Sumatra, intermediate between the Malay and Javanese, there are 555
words, of these two languages; in the Sunda of Java there are 530 ; in the Bali 4/0 ;
in the Bugis of Celebes 226 ;. in the Kayan of Borneo 114 ; in the Tagala of the
Philippines 23 ; in the Madagascar 20 ; and in the Maori or New Zealand 16. Of the
two languages, namely the Malay and Javanese, the proportion of words in the different
foreign tongues is always largest of the first, except in the languages in the immediate
neighbourhood of Java, such as the Lampung, the Sunda, the Madurese and Balinese.
This refers, however, only to words exclusively Malay or exclusively Javanese, for
the greater portion of the words belong equally to both tongues. The prevalence
of Malay words was what might naturally be looked for, since it was found on the
arrival of Europeans what it still continues to be, the common medium of intercommunication
from Sumatra to the Philippines.
The infused words have undergone some alterations in sense, but still more in
form, and the amount of corruption in both respects is generally great in proportion
as we recede from Java and Sumatra, the seats of the adopted languages.^ The
following are examples. In Malay and Javanese, kâris is a poniard or dagger ; in the