ON THE ROOTS IN THE MALAY LANGUAGE. 259 
firing a revolver, or when the motion of certain bodies sudden- 
ly ceases as, for instance, the surcease of falling drops of 
water. We fear, however, that these explanations are not quite 
as correct or as much to the point as might be desired. From 
the derivatives of ¢is we find that it principally implies the 
meaning of a continual dripping or falling down, and this suf- 
ficiently explains the use of the component letters of a word in 
which s is to be taken more in the light of a continuant than 
sibilant, and is employed for the special purpose of contrasting 
_with the nasal because there is here no necessity for a letter to 
express resonance ; besides s is the only consonant which ad- 
mits of being used in conjunction witha ?¢. ‘Then, again, we 
know how closely a final s approaches the sound of / in pro- 
nunciation, being deprived of much of its property in losing 
part of its hissing sound through aspiration. 
It seems that r does not appear in concert with ¢, but it oc- 
curs in words of the same species, e. g.. gar and sar, where the 
adoption of 7 is permissible because of the nature ‘of the tone 
to the meaning of which it adds the impression that the sound 
of rattling is to be heard ; still, considering the various signifi- 
cations of these words, it would not be easy to comprehend 
them under one common category. 
From several of these little words new ones are formed by 
again affixing the self-same prefixes ké and /é when it often 
happens that a nasal has been introduced before the ¢, and that 
kélé also occurs as kéeré. Neither of these two modifications is 
uncommon. It is not necessary to draw the line when one has 
stated that / is confused with 7, for we so frequently discover a 
phonetically intrusive n in the penultimate of primitive words 
that, as a rule, the fact of having found the one affords sufficient 
evidence for assuming the existence of the other. 
Until now, we have merely occupied ourselves with the pre- 
liminary or first changes of the root, and have not paid atten- 
tion to any except the original meanings; a further advance 
should then be our next step. The dictionary supplies us with 
active forms for a few of these words, like toek, tas, toes, tom, 
which respectively signify the producing of these radical tones. 
But there is no reason why verbs from all such words may not 
