220 K- N. Oust — Languages oftlie Indo-Chinese [Nov. 



separate notice : 1. The Malay proper. 2. The Javanese in its modern 

 form, and the archaic Kawi, with its three sister-languages, the Balinese, 

 Sundanese, and Madurese. 3. The Sassak of Lombok. 4, 5. The Ma- 

 cassar and Bugi of Celebes. 6, 7. The Tagal and Bisayan of the Philip- 

 pines. 8. The Dhyak of Borneo. 9. The Batta, with its three dialects ; 

 the Lampung and Rejang, all in Sumatra. Crawt'urd thinks that they may 

 morphologically be divided into three great classes : 1. From Sumatra 

 to Borneo and Lompok eastward. 2. From Celebes to the Moluccas in- 

 clusive. 3 The Philippine Archipelago. There is considerable difference 

 in structure, but still more in phonetism. These languages have among 

 them eleven indigenous alphabets, four. viz. the archaic Bugi, the Bima, the 

 Kawi, and old Sundanese, obsolete, and seven in daily use, the Javanese, 

 Bugi, Batta, Kejang, Lampong, Korinchi, and -Tagal. All of these alpha- 

 bets, though their use is immemorial, are phonetic, and like the Indian, are 

 so far syllabaries, that they include an a in their sound. All of them (ex- 

 cept Kawi) Crawfurd maintains to be of native origin, and not to belong 

 to any alphabetical family ; he admits that some of them may have borrowed 

 their ari'angement and some modification from Indian sources. Subsequent 

 study of the subject of Al^Dhabets in general has led to the affiliation through 

 the Phoenician of every known alphabet (in the strict sense) to the Egyp- 

 tian hieroglyphics being looked upon as a scientific fact. The remaining 

 languages are represented by vocabularies, but have no literature, and will 

 probably give way to their stronger rivals. It would be a waste of time and 

 type to set out their names, for nothing is really known worth recording ; 

 but they stand out as a warning with many others of the futility of attempts 

 to affiliate all languages to one, or to bring back languages to a limited 

 number of seed plots, until the data for such theories are in a much more 

 advanced state of preparation . 



" We must here notice briefly a very great controversy, of first-rate 

 importance both from its subject matter, and the fame of the scholars who 

 have taken part in it. William von Humboldt in his posthumous work, 

 * Ueber die Kawi Sprache,' arrived at the conclusion, * that Malay was the 

 stem, from which the various languages spoken by the brown races in- 

 habiting the archipelago had branched out ; that all the brown races be- 

 longed to one family, the Malay ; that a convulsion of nature had broken 

 up a continent, and left a few survivors of the common race in the islands ; 

 that Malay was probably an Indo-European language,' which last assertion 

 was more particularly pressed by the illustrious grammarian Bopp. Mr. 

 Craw^furd brought a local experience of forty years, and a knowledge o£ the 

 vernaculars, to bear against the theories of Humboldt and Bopp, and in the 

 dissertation in his Malay Grammar (1852) denied that the brown people 

 belonged to one race : he maintained that there were several brown races 



