A Manual of the Malay language by Sir Maxwell William Edward (free reads .TXT) 📕

Javanese, Sundanese, and Dayak; but why it should give its name, in the form of layu, to a river in Sumatra, and thence to the whole Malay race, is not very obvious. A river named in consequence of its swift current would be called by Malays Sungei Laju, not Sungei Malaju. Even if the derivation of Malayu from melaju had the support of the Malays themselves, Malay etymologies are not often safe guides. Not much, for instance, can be said in favour of the fanciful derivation of Sumatra from semut raya, “large ant,” which is given by the author of the Sâjarah Malayu.45

It is impossible to treat the story of Sang Sapurba, the first Malay raja, as historical. The name, “Maha-Meru,” sufficiently shows that we are upon mythological ground. The story is as follows:— Three young men descend from the heavens of Indra (ka indra-an) upon the mountain Maha-Meru, on the slopes of which they meet two women who support themselves by planting hill-padi. Supernatural incidents mark the advent of the strangers. The very corn in the ground puts forth ears of gold, while its leaves become silver and its stalks copper. One of the new-comers rides on a white bull, and carries a sword called Chora (Sansk. kshura, a razor) samandang-kini. They are received by the natives of the district (Palembang) and made rajas. He who rides the bull becomes king of Menangkabau, and the other two receive minor kingdoms.

It is not difficult to recognise here certain attributes of the god Çiva, with which, by a not unnatural confusion of ideas, Muhammadan Malays, the recipients of the old traditions, have clothed their first raja.

Maha-Meru, or Sumeru, on which are the abodes of the gods, is placed by Hindu geographers in the centre of the earth. Malaya is mentioned in the Puranas as a mountain in which the Godavari and other rivers take their rise. The white bull of Sang Sapurba is evidently the vahan of Çiva, and the name of the sword bears a close resemblance to manda-kini, the name given in heaven to the sacred Ganges, which springs from the head of Çiva. Most of the incidents in the story, therefore, are of purely Hindu origin, and this gives great probability to the conjecture which assigns a Sanskrit source to the word Malayu. The Straits of Malacca abound with places with Sanskrit names. Not to speak of Singha-pura, there are the islands of Langka-wi and Lingga and the towns of Indragiri and Indrapura, &c. Sumeru (in Java), Madura, Ayuthia (in Siam), and many other names, show how great Indian influences have been in past times in the far East. May it not be, therefore, that Malaya or Malayu46 was the name by which the earliest Sanskrit-speaking adventurers from India denominated the rude tribes of Sumatra and the peninsula with whom they came in contact, just as Jawi is the name given to Malays by the Arabs, the term in either case being adopted by the people from those to whom they looked up with reverence as their conquerors or teachers? According to this view, the introduction of a river, Malayu, into the story of Sang Sapurba is an ex post facto way of explaining the name, inserted with this object by the native author of the Sâjarah Malayu.

If it be granted that the story of Sang Sapurba is mythological, it becomes unnecessary to follow any attempt to show that the name of Malayu received additional celebrity from the marriages of granddaughters of Demang Lebar Daun with the Batara of Majapahit and the Emperor of China! The contemptuous style in which Malay, Javanese, and other barbarian rajas are spoken of by ancient Chinese historians leaves but slender probability to the legend that an Emperor of China once took a Malay princess as his wife.47

From this subject it is natural to proceed to another disputed etymology, namely, the origin of the word Jawi, which is often used by the Malays for the word Malayu in speaking of their language and written character, bahasa jawi meaning Malay language, and surat jawi a document written in Malay. It is not necessary to go into all the various conjectures on the subject, which will be found in the works of Marsden, Crawfurd, Favre, and others.

Jawi is a word of Arab origin, and is formed in accordance with the rules of Arabic grammar from the noun Jawa, Java. Just as from Makah, Meccah, is derived the word Makk-i, of or belonging to Meccah, so from Jawa, Java, we get Jawi, of or belonging to Java. When this name was first applied to Malays, the Arabs had not an accurate knowledge of the ethnography of the Eastern Archipelago. Without very strict regard to ethnical divergencies, they described all the brown races of the eastern islands under the comprehensive and convenient term Jawi, and the Malays, who alone among those races adopted the Arabic alphabet, adopted also the term in speaking of their language and writing.48

As in Malay there are no inflexions to denote change of number, gender, or person, the connection of Jawi with Jawa is quite unknown to the Malays, just as the second part of the word senamaki (sena-maki, senna of Meccah49) is not suspected by them to have any reference to the sacred city. There is a considerable Malay and Javanese colony in Meccah,50 where all are known to the Meccans indiscriminately as Jawi.

Marsden devotes several pages of the introduction to his Malay Grammar to a discussion as to the origin and use of the expression orang di-bawah angin, people below the wind, applied by Malays to themselves, in contradistinction to orang di-atas angin, people above the wind, or foreigners from the West. He quotes from De Barros and Valentyn, and from several native documents, instances of the use of these expressions, but confesses his inability to explain their origin. Crawfurd quotes these terms, which he considers to be “native,” and remarks that they are used by the Malays alone of all the tribes in the Archipelago. A much more recent writer characterises these terms as “Noms dont on ignore encore la vraie signification.”51

The expression is not of Malay origin, but is a translation into that language of an Arabic phrase. Instances of its use occur in the “Mohit” (the ocean), a Turkish work on navigation in the Indian seas, written by Sidi al Chelebi, captain of the fleet of Sultan Suleiman the Legislator, in the Red Sea. The original was finished at Ahmedabad, the capital of Gujarat, in the last days of Muharram, A.H. 962 (A.D. 1554). It enumerates, among others, “the monsoons below the wind, that is, of the parts of India situated below the wind,” among which are “Malacca, Shomotora, Tanassari, Martaban, and Faiku (Pegu).”52

TRANSLITERATION OF MALAY IN THE ROMAN CHARACTER.

Malay is written in a character which has been borrowed from a foreign literature in comparatively modern times, and which but imperfectly suits its sounds. With the introduction of the Muhammadan religion, the Malays adopted the Arabic alphabet, modified to suit the peculiarities of their language.

In Malay literary compositions there is great diversity in the manner of spelling many words. The accentuation of the spoken dialect differs so much from Arabic, that it is difficult, even for native writers, to decide when to write the long vowels and when to leave them out. This is the point in which diversity is most common.

Every European author who writes Malay in the Roman character has to decide on what system he intends to render the native language by means of our alphabet. The Malay alphabet has thirty-four letters, so it is obvious that ours will not accurately correspond with it. It is open to him, if he wishes to obtain a symbol to correspond with every letter of the Malay alphabet, to employ various means to denote those letters for which we have no equivalents; or he may dismiss the native alphabet from his mind altogether, and determine to write the language phonetically. In a language, however, which abounds in Sanskrit and Arabic words, he should, of course, avoid the adoption of any system of spelling which would disguise the true origin of words of foreign derivation.

Muhammadans from India or Persia introduced their own method of writing among the Malays. They wrote Malay in their own character (to the gradual supersession of any native alphabet that may have previously existed), and this became the alphabet of the Malays.

It is now our turn to write Malay in our character. Is it sufficient to do this in our own way, as those did who introduced the Perso-Arabic alphabet, or must we also have regard to the mode of spelling adopted by the latter?

In an elementary work like the present, it does not seem to be necessary to burden the student with a system of transliteration. The native character is not employed in this manual, and there is, therefore, all the less occasion for using special means for denoting peculiar native letters. It will be found that the mode of spelling Malay words adopted by Marsden has been followed in the main.53 In this Introduction the long vowels (that is, the vowels which are written in full in the native character) are marked with a circumflex accent, but it has not been thought necessary to adopt this system in the body of the work.

Sometimes vowels will be found marked with the short sign, ˘. This is only for the purpose of assisting the student in pronunciation, and does not represent any peculiarity in the native character.

The vowels are to be sounded in general as in the languages of the Continent of Europe. Final k is mute.

The correct pronunciation of Arabic words is aimed at by Malays of education, and the European student should get the right sounds of the vowel ain and of the more peculiar Arabic consonants explained to him.

Introduction: Footnotes