214 THE LANGUAGES OF THE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 
this. Two modes of expressing another sound of this vowel 
are given, and the sound is not correctly defined. His ortho¬ 
graphy of the'third vowel has two faults. It gives a prosodi- 
al mark to the most common sound of this vowel in Malay. 
It gives two characters to a second sound, and does not dis¬ 
tinguish between this and the preceding sound short. 
The defects of the scheme appear to arise from Mr Marsden 
not having critically attended to the pronunciation of the weak 
vowel sounds when in Sumatra, or having lost his familiarity 
with them when he compiled his dictionary in England He 
evidently intended to express the short sound of all the vowels 
by an uniform system of double representation, the simple 
letter and the short mark of quantity. Unfortunately, to those 
who can listen to the language as read and spoken by Malays, 
this uniformity vanishes. 
In the system which Mr Crawfurd has proposed in this 
Journal he, like Mr Marsden, adopts the Continental pro¬ 
nunciation of the vowels, but he avoids the error ot giving 
two symbols for the same sound. His scheme however is 
imperfect in not affording the means of sufficiently denoting 
the different sounds of each vowel. The only instance in 
which any other beside the principal sound can be expressed 
is the a, the short sound of which he denotes by a, thus 
reversing Sir W Jones’ method, and forcing the acute accent 
to perform an office very alien from its usual function. 
The system adopted by most Dutch writers on Malay is 
we believe the same as that used by Van Eysinga in his Ma¬ 
layan Grammar and Dictionary.* With the exception of one 
or two Dutch peculiarities, it nearly agrees with the ortho¬ 
graphy generally adopted by Continental philologists for Asia¬ 
tic languages. The long sound of the vowels is marked by 
the angular circumflex, and the short by the unaccented letters. 
The illustrious Professor Bopp applies this mode to the Ma¬ 
layan and Polynesian languages in his “ Verwandtscbaft der 
Malayisch-Polynesischen Sprachen mit. den Indisch—Euro- 
paisehen.” A system adopted by the greatest philo'ogists of 
Europe, and likely to be generally known in England through 
the translation of the Comparative Grammar of this most 
philosophical and profound analyst of languages, would have 
superior claims even to that of Sir W Jones, if our choice 
were to be controled by authority instead of being guided by 
convenience. 
The careful examination of these different orthographies, 
* Werndly, who preceded Marsden as a grammarian, and anticipated him 
to a large extent, does not use any accents. 
