MALAY AND ENGLISH SPELLING. 47 



I. The Vowels. 



5. The five vowels when used in writing" Malay and Chinese 

 words have the Continental, or, more strictly, the Italian, sound. 



They sometime? have a long sound, and are then written with 

 a circumflex accent over them, thus a, e &c; and sometimes they 

 have a short sound, when they are written a, e &c, without any 

 accent. This is more fully explained in the subjoined table. The 

 Committee consider that the labour of writing the accent over 

 the long vowels will be far more than compensated for by the 

 accuracy in pronunciation that will be secured, as the accent 

 will point out the accentuated syllables. If " Sarawak" and 

 " Sembilan" had always been so written, Englishmen would have 

 been saved the absurd mistake of pronouncing them Sarahivhac/c 

 and Sambilan, as if the accent were on the first syllable in each 

 case instead of the second. 



6. But in addition to those vowel sounds which may be fair- 

 ly represented by the five vowels marked as long and short, there 

 is another of exceedingly frequent occurrence in Malay which is 

 so vague and indefinite that no natural representative at once 

 suggests itself, and Malay scholars have given different render- 

 ings of it. xifter long and careful deliberation the Committee 

 have come to the conclusion that there will be the least danger 

 of misunderstanding if this sound be uniformly expressed by the 

 letter e so written. The mark of shortness (6) is very important 

 to distinguish it from the common short e as sounded in the 

 English words "pen," met," to which it bears little resemblance. 

 The sound which we wish to express by this character (£) is that 

 of e in such words as " lateral" " considerable." 



The Arabic letter c (ain), which is found in a few Malay 



words, takes the sound of all the vowels, long and short, in turn 

 And its presence will be indicated by a dot written underneath 

 thus a e &c, or a e &c. 



8. There are two dipthongal sounds which will be written au 

 and ei, pronounced as in the table below. 



