90 THE EVOLUTION OF MALAY SPELLING. 



My contention therefore is, that the use of t:ish<Ud to indi- 

 cate the short vowel sound was merely a local custom at Acheen. 

 which the influence of even such a comparatively powerful 

 State did not avail to bring into general use in the Archipelago. 

 If this usage had been in accord with the Arabic orthography, 

 it would undoubtedly have I een universally adopted in the same 

 way as the tashdid over u-au and ya mentioned in the last para- 

 graph (4. a.). 



(5) We next come to the use of the weak letters alif, wan. 

 and ya in open syllables. Their use at the end of a word has al- 

 ready been considered in (I ) and (2). We will now inquire when 

 and for what purpose these weak letters were used in the old MSS. 

 in the middle of (a) root words, (b) derivatives. 



(a) In root words, the weak letters are found in the open 

 syllable upon which the accent falls, except in the case of the 

 short vowel. The accent being u»ually on the penultimate, that 

 is the syllable in which the weak letter is usually found. 



In accordance with the rules of Arabic orthography, a weak 

 letter when thus placed in an open syllable after a correspond- 

 ing vowel is k ' quiescent and then serves only to lengthen the 



vowel which precedes it." * Thus in the word j\j " sufficient;' 



the vowel of the penultimate is lengthened by the alif. The 



preposition aI is, however, never spelt with an alif: not that 



there is any very appreciable difference in the pronunciation of 

 these two words, but rather perhaps on account of the fact that 

 in conversation less stress will naturally fall upon a preposition 

 than upon a noun, adjective or verb. This seems to be the 

 only possible way to account for the absence of the alif. wan 

 and ya in such words as 



sudak mala pada deri sagala 



oA* 



Ax* A9 j J Jfx*v 



which in our MSS-, as far as 1 have noticed, are the only words 

 which do not have the lengthening weak letters in the accented 

 syllable, with the exception of the foreign word saudagar which 



* Faris 1 Arabic Grammar. 



