Biar-lah hamba sa-orang diri me-lawan dia, let me fight him myself alone.
V. VERBS.
Verbs are either primitive or derivative; the former are those which in their original signification are verbs; the latter are formed from primitive verbs, or from substantives, adjectives, or adverbs, by the application of particles.
Examples of primitive verbs are pukul, to strike; makan, to eat; lari, to run; of derivative verbs, ber-kaki, to have feet, from kaki, a foot; panjang-kan, to lengthen or make long, from panjang, long.
The primitive verb, which is generally a dissyllable, is either transitive, as tangkap, to seize, or intransitive, as tidor, to sleep; but a transitive sense may be given to an intransitive verb by the addition of the particle -kan, as lari, me-lari, to run; me-lari-kan, to carry off.
Though the examples of primitive verbs given above are translated for the sake of convenience by our infinitive, their signification is not necessarily rendered by that mood. Favre translates them by the past participle (as ambil, taken, buang, thrown[2]), but this is rather fanciful than accurate. The fact is, that the meaning of the radical or primitive is indefinite, and depends for its precise signification on its position (with respect to other words) in the sentence, or on the particles which may be added before or after it. Thus lari means simply run, though syntax will show that it may mean to run, I run, he runs, run thou, &c., according to its position in the sentence.
Marsden distinguishes the following moods—the imperative, the indicative or assertive, the conditional, and the infinitive or indefinite—“which admit, for the most part, of being expressed in the present, the past, and the future tenses or times.”
It is not proposed, in an elementary work like the present, to go deeply into a scientific arrangement, which, however well suited to the Latin and Greek languages, is adapted with less propriety to uncultivated languages like Malay. It is believed that an explanation of the use of auxiliaries and particles, and a paradigm showing the most common changes of which the verb is susceptible, will be sufficient, and that the student may be left to gain further knowledge as to the mode of expressing variations of mood and tense as he advances in the study of the language.[3]
[Use of Particles.]
The inseparable affix -kan always denotes a verb used in a transitive sense; as men-jalan-kan, to cause to walk. It is an abbreviation of the preposition akan. Thus buat-kan (to do) means to do something to (akan) something or somebody.