256 ON THE ROOTS IN THE MALAY LANGUAGE. 
accordingly, in ‘¢vk-tvk 7. e., tak-é-tik it would appear that there 
has been a suppression of the initial #2. But neither the one 
or the other of these arguments is satisfactery. 
The other prefix /é is very commonly affixed to tone-words 
and seems to remind us of the well-known particle /ah, but we 
should certainly experience some trouble in endeavouring to 
prove them one and the same, even though there were no ap- 
parently more correct explanation at our command. At the 
same time, it cannot be denied that the difficulty, so far as it 
consists in the fact that /a should have lost its fulness of sound, 
and that, too, in the penultimate, is removed by remembering 
that the meaning causes the stress to fall on the root, so that 
la remains unaccented. Yet, notwithstanding this, there is, m 
our opinion a still better interpretation by which the question 
may be settled. We have a third form of derivative, the re- 
sult of a combination of the prefixes ké and /é, found in words 
like kélétik and kélétoek ; these, 16 is true, are once more des- 
cribed as precisely corresponding in meaning with the other 
words, but in this instance, at all events, the idea of attribut- 
ing the construction to the influence of phonetic principles 
would certainly have but little weight in its favour. Besides, in 
this species of combination, one very naturally expects to find 
an intrusive 7, in consequence of which kétik would become 
kélétik. In this, as in other languages, the notion conveyed 
by the vibration of the tongue, viz., that of ‘frequency’ (not 
losing sight of the frequent confusion of an 7 with an /) has, 
it is quite evident, absolutely no effect upon the quality of the 
tone; the quantity suffers a change but, the quality remains 
entirely unaltered. Assuming this to be the correct version, 
it would be esseutial that we should, in considering the form 
létik, acquiesce in the premises that the first term of the word, 
i. e. the syllable 2@, had been suppressed, since 1¢ cannot possi- 
bly be argued that ké in kélétik is probably a prefiguration to 
the word /étik ; for this would certainly not have taken place 
without some purpose (a phonetic reason is out of the question 
here), and the very nature of the thing only admits of a modi-~ 
fication of the quantity, seeing that the quality 1s expressed by 
vowel-change. 
As a consequence of the necessity of supplying a demand 
