MALAY AND ENGLISH SPELLING. 49 



II. The Consonants. 



10. A table of Consonants is ^i ven below with their respec- 

 tive sounds, and their Malay equivalents. It will be observed 

 that " c, " " g " soft,, and " q " are omitted, and they should 

 never be employed in writing Oriental languages in Roman 

 characters, as their sound is better represented by "?," "\" "k," 

 respectively, and the use of them has led to strange mistakes. 

 An instauce of this is the name of Kedah, which having been 

 spelt " Quedah, " has come to be pronounced " Kwidah." 



li. It is important to remember that whenever the letters 

 Ci ng" occur together they represent one letter only, and that 

 letter has uniformly the sound of" ng" in " singing/ 7 not that 

 of " ng" either in " single" or in " singed." Whenever it is in- 

 tended that the " g J should be sounded hard, as in " single/' the 

 word must be written with a second " g" as " Sunggoh" 

 " Trengganu." The letters " w " and "i/" are only used as 

 Consonants. 



12. The final" Tc" in Malay words is usually silent in the 

 Straits Settlements and the Malay Peninsula ; or rather it is only 

 partially sounded, being begun and then stopped suddenly. 



13. The apostrophe ( ' ) represents the Malay mark " hamza" 

 ( ' ). When it occurs in the middle of a word, as in "sa'orang," 

 it serves as a mark of separation between syllables; at the end of 

 a word it has the same effect as the final " k." 



14. Some of the Consonants arc written, like the vowels re- 

 presenting c ( ain ), with a dot beneath. This is the case where 



two or more letters in the Malay Alphabet are represented by 

 one Roman character. Almost all the characters bearing this 

 mark are confined to words of Arabic origin, such as a certain 

 number of proper names, and words connected with Religion. 

 Their use therefore will be limited, the great bulk of words in 

 the Malay language being written in the simpler characters. 



15. We can now give the table of Consonants which will 

 actually be used. Whenever nothing is said respecting pronun- 

 ciation the letter has the ordinary English sound. 



