THE MALAY LANGUAGE.
By R. CLYDE FORD,
PROFESSOR OF GERMAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE, ALBION COLLEGE.
A gentleman who had lived for several years among the Indians of the Canadian northwest said that he went among them believing they were an untutored race. But when they told him of a dozen kinds of berries growing in a locality where he knew but two, brought him flowers he could not find after careful search, and around their council fires showed as deep an insight into the mysteries of life as the savants of his university, then he concluded they could no longer be called untutored.
And why should they be? Is there no culture or civilization outside of the enlightenment of Europe or America? And because a civilization does not exactly fit the grooves in which most of the world has moved, may it not be a real civilization for all that? If such is possible, then we vote the Malays a cultured people. Of course, their culture is not like our own; it knows no railroads, no telegraphs, boasts of no intricate political machinery, has no complicated social despotisms. Native princes rule for the most part over peaceful states, and politics means no more than the regulation of quiet village life. But what need of railroads, when the rivers are avenues of trade and communication? Why telegraphs, when the world is bounded by the jungle horizon? Or why, in short, severe civil and social enactments, when the common Wahlspruch of life is, "Fear disgrace rather than death"? Such a civilization, we admit, is a humble one; but it also has the advantage of being a happy one. And where contentment dwells, where honesty prevails, where the home is a stronghold, there are culture and civilization, even though they may not coincide with our own.
The Malays are not barbarians, and their language by its grace and adaptability has shown its right to be. To-day it is the mother tongue of more than forty millions of people, and the lingua franca of Chinamen, Hindus, European, and natives. It is spoken from Madagascar to the distant islands of the Pacific, and from the Philippines to Australia. With it one can barter in Celebes and sell in Java; converse with a sultan in Sumatra or a Spaniard in Manila. Moreover, it is soft and melodious, rich in expression, poetical in idiom, and simple in structure—a language almost without grammar and yet of immense vocabulary, with subtle distinctions and fine gradations of thought and meaning; a language that sounds in one's ears long after Tanah Malayu and the coral islands and the jungle strand have sunk into hazy recollection, just as they once dropped out of sight behind one's departing ship.
Malay is written in the Arabic character, which was adopted with Mohammedanism, probably in the thirteenth century. Anciently, the Malays used a writing of their own, but it is not yet clearly settled what it was. There are now thirty-four characters employed, each varying in form, according as it is isolated, final, medial, or initial. Naturally, the Arabic influence over the language has been a marked one; the priest who dictates in the religion of a people is a molder and shaper of language. We have only to recall the Catholic Church and the influence of the Latin tongue in the mouths of her priests to know that this is so. Many Arabic words and phrases have been adopted, but more in the language of literature than in that of everyday speech. A large number of expressions of court and royalty, and terms of law and religion, are Arabic; also the names of months, days, and many articles of commerce and trade; nevertheless, the language of common speech is still Malay.
Another influence, also, has been felt in the Malay—that of the Sanskrit language. The presence of many Sanskrit words has caused some very ingenious theories to be constructed in proof that the Malays were of Indian origin, and such word fragments the survival of the primitive tongue. Such theories, however, have not stood the test of philology, and the fact still remains that the language is essentially unique, with an origin lost in the darkness of remote antiquity. However, Sanskrit influence has been much greater, and has penetrated much deeper into the elemental structure of the language than the Arabic. In fact, the aboriginal language, before it felt the animating spirit of the Aryan tongue, must have been a barren one, the language of a primitive man, a fisherman, a hunter, a careless tiller of the soil. As Maxwell says in his Manual of the Malay Language, the Sanskrit word hala (plow) marks a revolution in Malayan agriculture and, one may say further, Malayan civilization. What changed the methods of cultivating the soil, changed the people themselves. It is probable that this change came through contact with people to whom Sanskrit was a vernacular tongue, but whether through conquest by the sword or by religion is hard to tell. Perhaps it was by both. At any rate, it was deep and strong, and left a lasting impression on the language. Sanskrit names fastened on trees, plants, grain, fruits, household and agricultural implements, parts of the body, articles of commerce, animals, metals and minerals, time and its division and measurement, family relationships, abstract conceptions, warfare, and fundamental ideas of religion and superstition. Such a conquest must have been an early and tremendous one.
Strangely enough, Malay is almost a grammarless tongue. It has no proper article, and its substantives may serve equally well as verbs, being singular or plural, and entirely genderless. However, adjectives and a process of reduplication often indicate number, and gender words are added to nouns to make sex allusions plain. Whatever there is of declension is prepositional as in English, and possessives are formed by putting the adjectives after the noun as in Italian. Nouns are primitive and derivative, the derivations being formed by suffixes or prefixes, or both, and one's mastery of the language may be gauged by the idiomatic way in which he handles these Anhängsel. Adjectives are uninflected.