THE MALAY LANGUAGE. 815 



of a primitive man, a fisherman, a hunter, a careless tiller of the soil. 

 As Maxwell sajs 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. What- 

 ever there is of declension is prepositional as in English, and posses- 

 sives 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 Anhangsel. 

 Adjectives are uninflected. 



The use of the pronouns involves an extensive knowledge of Ori- 

 ental etiquette — some being used by the natives among one another, 

 some between Europeans and natives, some employed when an in- 

 ferior addresses a superior and vice versa, some used only when the 

 native addresses his prince or sovereign; and, last of all, some being 

 distinctly literary, and never employed colloquially. Into this maze 

 one must go undaunted, and trust to time and patience to smooth out 

 difficulties. 



Verbs, like nouns, are primitive and derivative, with some few 

 auxiliaries and a good many particles which are suffixed or prefixed 

 to indicate various states and conditions. These things are apt to be 

 confusing, and when the student learns that a verb may be past, 

 present, or future without any change in form, he does not know 

 whether to congratulate himself or not. Prepositions, too, are many 

 and expressive; conjunctions, some colloquial, some pedantic. 



We now come to a peculiarity which Malay has in common with 

 other Indo-Chinese languages — the " numeral co-efficients," as Max- 

 well calls them, which are always employed with a certain class of 



