212 DR. BRANDSTETTER'S RESEARCHES. 



is not room here to discuss them all, nor are they all of equal 

 interest to readers in the Malay Peninsula; I will therefore 

 confine myself to those which appeal more particularly to stu- 

 dents of Malay. .-...; . , t 



His two studies on the "relation of Malagasy to Malay" 

 (1893; pp. 43) and on "Tagal and Malagasy "(1902; pp. 85), 

 taken together, give a very clear idea of the interconnection of 

 these languages and throw considerable light on their past his- 

 tory and development. 



Brandstetter's strong point is his strictly scientific method. 

 He will not accept conjectural identifications or vague unsup- 

 ported theories of relationship : he distinguishes most carefully 

 between what he considers to be proved and what is merely 

 probable. Consequently his results, when they are such as he 

 himself considers certain, may be accepted with a high degree 

 of confidence by his readers. 



In choosing two languages so widely separated in geo- 

 graphical distribution as Tagal (or Tagalog) and Malagasy for 

 his points of comparison, he brings out very strikingly the essen- 

 tial unity of the Malayan family of languages, a unity which 

 is evidently due to common descent and not, as Crawfurd per- 

 versely maintained, to the influence of Malay or Javanese modify- 

 ing a number of originally alien tongues. English students 

 of this subject seem to find a difficulty in getting away from the 

 idea that Malay is the normal type of a Malayan language: 

 that, however, is very far from being the case. From the point 

 of view of phonology, Malay is often relatively very archaic, 

 much nearer to the original sounds, than some of the cognate 

 tongues (e. g. Malagasy and Javanese) ; but even in this regard 

 Malay is not always the truest representative of the primitive 

 type. Then again Malay lacks many old words which have been 

 preserved in distant and widely separated parts of the Malayo- 

 polynesian region; and this, as van der Tuuk pointed out long 

 ago, is proof enough that they do not owe their common element 

 to Malay. Further, Malay is so much simplified in its grammar 

 that it occupies in the Malayan family much the same relative 

 position, that modern Persian or English occupy among the Indo- 

 European languages: its system of agglutination has been re- 



Jour. Straita Branch 



