BRANDSTETTER'S INDONESIAN LINGUISTICS. 71 



" Root and Word in the Indonesian Languages " is the first 

 essay. It deals with the extraction of roots from stem-words, which 

 are normally dissyllabic in Indonesian languages; and it describes 

 the morphological process by which stem-words have been con- 

 structed by means of formative syllables, usually prefixes, some- 

 times infixes more rarely suffixes, — formatives which cannot become 

 roots themselves. Compare a series of stem-words and we find 

 often a common syllable running through them, as lok through 

 Ulolc, kelok, jelok, pelok; it may be inferred that all those dis- 

 syllabic words are constructed from lok. Maxwell surmised that 

 in tangkap we have the Sakai teng i hand.' It is not absolutely 

 impossible, considering that a few Indonesian stem-words are built 

 up by the juxtaposition of two roots. But it is exceedingly impro- 

 bable and far-fetched: compare cMkap, tekap, terkap, tangkap, 

 vangkap, cliakup, cltekup, tekup, serekup, tangkup : we have the 

 common syllables kap, kup and, as a matter of fact, t and ch will 

 be found to be common Indonesian prefixes and ng a common 

 Indonesian infix. The comparative method throws light, where 

 the study of Malay alone would lead nowhere: it shows for ex- 

 ample how sesal, sesip, tetap, sesak are instances of reduplication 

 of roots and appear in Madurese as selsel, sepsep, teptep, seksek: 

 and again how de- is a common Indonesian formative making 

 word-bases from interjections. Among the roots that can serve as 

 word-bases, Brandstetter detects onomatopoeic interjections, other 

 interjections, baby words, forms of address, monosyllabic preposi- 

 tions and pronouns. He uses the comparative method with strict 

 adherence to phonetic laws — a principle our smatterers in Malay 

 philology have always failed to observe. 



The second essay deals with " Common Indonesian and Ori- 

 ginal Indonesian " mainly from the point of view of phonetics and 

 grammar. If a word or formative is found throughout the In- 

 donesian area or in two or three widely distant parts of that area, 

 then it must be regarded as common and primitive. Crawfurd's 

 notion of Malay and Javanese influencing a number of tongues 

 originally unconnected is exploded for ever. The essay is extra- 

 ordinarily suggestive and does much to solve the vexed problems 

 of Malay formatives, verbal substantival and adjectival. In- 

 cidentally Brandstetter shows how there were more monosyllabic 

 words in the original language than are now in use and how the' 

 grammatical system was fuller than it is, for example, in modern 

 Malay. And here I should like to invite attention to the nicer 

 nuances of the formatives in old Malay literature like the Sejarah 

 Melayu and the Seri Rama, where later authors display careless- 

 ness or ignorance. How many modern writers could be trusted to^ 

 write jika ia berbuang kiiku, " if he cut his nails." 



The " Indonesian Verb/' the third essay in this volume, does 

 still more to explain the nature of the verb and its formatives. 

 The importance of the subject for students of Malay will be obvious 

 to all who have struggled with de Hollander's i subjective-passive * 



R. A. Soc, No. 76, 1917. 



