70 BRANDSTETTER'S INDONESIAN LINGUISTICS. 



In Holland the scientific study of Malayan philology was continued 

 forthwith by Kern, Niemann, Brandes and others. No English- 

 man pursued the subject further; no Englishman read what the 

 Dutch were doing; in the English language there. has been no ad- 

 vance, no further point de repere till Mr. Blagden gives us now in 

 English the cream of the philological work of Dr. Brandstetter, a 

 brilliant Swiss scholar of the school of van der Tuuk and Kern. 



The name and work of Brandstetter are not unknown to 

 members of our branch Society. Mr. Blagden gave us an appre- 

 ciation of his earlier work in Journal XLII, but since then 

 Brandstetter has made great strides. 



The present translation has been termed " An Introduction 

 to Indonesian Linguistics." So vague has been the use of the- 

 word ' Indonesian ' by British scholars, that it is well to define 

 its meaning. For anthropologists, i Indonesian ' denotes a parti- 

 cular physical strain; for the student of language, it denotes the 

 western division of the great Austronesian (or Malay o-Polynesian 

 or Oceanic) family of speech, the division which irrespectively of 

 racial elements is spoken by the inhabitants of the Philippines, the 

 Malay Archipelago, the Malay Peninsula, the Mergui Archipelago 

 and parts of In do- China and of Formosa. i Indonesian ? is a 

 term preferable to ' Malayan/ because Achinese or Javanese or 

 Tagalog are no more Malay than Spanish is Italian. Mr. Blagden 

 points • out how " Malay in many ways is not a very typical mem- 

 ber of the family; its grammar has been much worn down and 

 simplified; and for various other reasons it is unfortunate that so- 

 many people are tempted to survey the whole Indonesian field, with 

 its luxuriant diversity, through the rather distorting lens of a 

 knowledge of Malay alone. There has been a very widespread 

 tendency among Malay scholars to regard Malay as the standard 

 or norm of the Indonesian family and to attempt to explain the 

 differences which they noticed in the other languages as deviations 

 from that standard ; and that is very far from being the true view." 

 Of late years, the great Austronesian family has been linked 

 definitively with an Austroasiatic family, which embraces a number 

 of the languages of India and Indo-China, such as Munda, Khasi, 

 Mon Khmer, Mcobarese and Sakai. Kern has shown how Indo- 

 China was probably the point whence the proto-Malay descended 

 on the Archipelago. When French research in Cambodia has pro- 

 gressed even further than it has to-day, when we have fuller 

 dictionaries of Munda and Khasi and conversations recorded in 

 Sakai and when Mr. Blagden has published his work on Taking 

 (or Mon or Peguan) inscriptions — perhaps some day the synthesis 

 between the two great families may be worked out in detail. Mean- 

 while Brandstetter finds more than enough material awaiting study 

 in the Indonesian section of the one family. 



Four of Brandstetter's best essays are included in the present 

 volume, and Mr. Blagden has supplied cross-references, where the 

 subject matter overlaps. 



Jour. Straits Branch 



