122 
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE OF 
in the same manner as the aksara murda or g'de , the ca¬ 
pital letters of Cornets de Groot. Further, the Sundanese 
and Balinese agree in preserving the pure pronunciation of 
the vowel a in all eases, where the Javanese corrupt it to o (”) 
The a is also in these languages as in the Sanskrit, of 
far greater range and predominance than the other vowels. 
The only degeneration is to pepet d, and this may also be 
considered less as a short e than a short ejaculated d which is 
commonly used with a nasal sound following it (m or n 
and ng.) 
The language of Java must originally have possessed a 
closer relationship to the Balinese. This we conclude prin¬ 
cipally from the appearance of Malay, and also (following 
Humboldt I. 198) Tagala words, in the Kawi. At the 
period when the Kawi formed itself, the Javanese language 
could not yet have been so refined as it might have been if 
it had been formed in the course of ages in civilized Hindu 
states. The Malay words of the Kawi, which do not exhi¬ 
bit themselves in the present Javanese, are original Poly¬ 
nesian, and reveal to us the union which once existed 
between the languages of Sumatra, western and eastern 
Java, Bali and probably all the eastern islands, and which 
chiefly in the eastern or proper Java alone has been obscur¬ 
ed by a higher civilization. The influence of the polished 
Javanese has also, it is true, made itself felt in the Sunda 
territories, but the high language of those parts is far less 
developed than that of Java; it probably first began with 
the establishment of the kingdom of Pajajaren ; as on Bali 
with the arrival of the Javanese. On the last the division 
into castes operated most, which rendered necessary a su¬ 
bordination in the manner of speaking also. By the Java¬ 
nese however must the language have been rendered so 
complicated, since it was developed by them during more 
than a thousand years. A further knowledge of the lan¬ 
guages east of Java will probably still more confirm this 
position : the languages of all these islands are dialects 
differing little from each other , which have departed the less 
from the original 'parent the less and the later the people 
have received Hindu civilization. Besides the spoken lan¬ 
guages we have on Bali the written language; this is in 
poems, with the exception of the more new, the Kawi , and 
in the sacred writings of the priests, the Sanskrit. 
Humboldt (I. 188-203) has written best on the origin of 
the Kawi language. Some modifications however in the 
