88 THE EVOLUTION OF MALAY SPELLING. 



" tence or of its being- unnecessary. The Malay a\ ho has learnt 

 " to read the Koran, not only knows what the tashdid is. but also 

 " feels the advantage of it in Malay, for if one gets him into a cor- 

 " ner he will at last say : buboh-lah tashdid, k just put a tashdid 

 " over it.' 



" The non-use of the tashdid leads the Malay sometimes to 

 "■ the most peculiar spelling. For instance he is conscious that in the 

 " word redda, ' to abate' (as a storm or sickness) the accent lies 

 " on the first syllable and ought to be expressed, which it is not by 



i.J. or \\ ; therefore he lengthens the vowel of the (e) and 



"writes j\ , without troubling himself about the fact that it is 



ik absurd to lengthen the e. Some words, which are written with 

 " the same letters and vowel points, could not be distinguished 



" from each other without the tashdid,&s :J Utah (accent on the 



kw 2nd syllable) inter j. for a certain clinking sound, and ij lettak 

 " to place. I therefore use the tashdid everywhere in my diction- 

 "ary, where the pronunciation demands it, and write j. redda, 



",>co dengngah, o-%-» nietta 'raging.' And do we not ourselves 



" write for instance lctid-de, kiui-ne, indifferent as to the reason 

 " for doing so. It should be noted that in Malay words the 

 '• double consonants only appear after the e." 



From this it is evident that the Malay writers of the begin- 

 ning of the 17th century used the tashdid in a different way to 

 that advocated by \Verndly, Robinson and van cler Wall, and 

 moreover none of these methods of using this sign can be regard- 

 ed as being directly based upon the Arabic system of ortho- 

 graphy. The methods invented and used by Werndly, Robinson 

 and van der Wall were purely arbitrary, and soon fell into disuse, 

 and there seems to be every reason to believe that the use of tash- 

 did as found in our MSS. was also purely local and arbitrary, 

 for it is a remarkable fact that all the MSS. in which this use 

 of tashdid is found almost certainly came from Acheeri, and I 

 have not been able to find the tashdid used with the short vowel 



