THE EVOLUTION OF MALAY SPELLING. 77 



It is remarkable that these Malay MSS., written in many 

 different places and as far apart as Acheen and Celebes, exhibit 

 far less divergence from one another in regard to spelling than 

 can now be found in native letters and even in printed works 

 from different parts of the Archipelago. In those days, no 

 doubt, the art of writing was practised by comparatively few 

 persons, and they may have been scribes specially instructed in 

 the art, whereas to-day thousands of comparatively uneducated 

 natives write letters in Malay, and even print commercial and 

 other documents in any kind of spelling. Moreover, the old 

 manuscripts which have survived to tell us how the Malays wrote 

 their language in those days are mostly official documents or 

 religious and literary productions, all of which would naturally 

 be written by the best educated natives of the time. These con- 

 siderations will in a great measure account for the greater diver- 

 sity of Malay spelling which now exists, but the remarkable uni- 

 formity in the spelling of the MSS. of the 17th century can only 

 be adequately explained by the existence of some fixed standard 

 of spelling to which the scribes felt it necessary to conform. 

 That fixed standard, we may presume, was the Arabic system of 

 orthography. It was undoubtedly directly from the Arabs 

 that the Malays received their present written character, and 

 it is quite probable that for many years, perhaps for centuries, 

 the art of writing may have been almost entirely confined to 

 those Arabs who had learned the Malay language. 



It should moreover be remembered that at the time of the 

 advent of the Arabs the Malays were already scattered all over 

 the, Archipelago, from the north of Sumatra to the extreme east 

 of Java, and even as far as Celebes and the Moluccas, and must 

 be regarded as having been at that time merely a number of in- 

 dependent units divided up under the rule of a great number of 

 petty chiefs or rajas, who were often at war with one another, and 

 none of whom were sufficiently powerful to exercise any com- 

 manding influence over the remainder. This makes it even more 

 remarkable that there should be such striking uniformity in the 

 spelling of the Malay language throughout the Archipelago at 

 the period with which we are dealing. If the Arabs had at- 

 tempted to make an adaptation of their own system of spelling 

 to suit the peculiarities of the Malay language, the result would 



