MALAYALAM LANGUAGE

[s. 449] : One of the Dravidian family of Indian languages, spoken by the people of Malabar and Travancore in the south It is west part of the peninsula of Hindu stan. the vernacular of about three millions of people and is written with characters peculiar to itself. It is also called Malayalim. family of lanMALAYAN LANGUAGES: guages, of great simplicity of structure and of sounds, used by the natives of the Malay peninsula, of Madagascar, of the islands of the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, Polj^nesia and New Zealand. The tribes in the interior of the larger of these islands have languages generally cla ed as of independent stock, and the same seems to be true of the people of the Me lanes i an Islands, altho they are often cla ed as Malayan. Austral i ans have an entirely distinct language. In the case of those islands which we have named, the Malay characteristics are clearly A evident, altho the various dialects are numerous.. The Malay language proper is the lingua franc a Its most culof the East Indian Archipelago. tured dialect is that of the towns of Sumatra and Java. Its phonetic elements are simple, the grammatical structure is regular and its vocabulary, especially in nautical terms, is very copious. It has the five vowels, a, e, i, o, u, short and long,, with one diphthong. The consonants are b, d, g, h, J, k, I, TO, n, h, p, r, s, t, w, y, ng, ch. Malay a di yllabic language, with the accent as a rule on the penultimate, except where that is is open and short. Derived words are formed by prefixes, affixes, infixes and reduplisyllable cation. Much skill is displayed in the idiomatic use of the hundred or more derivative forms. There are no infiectional forms to distinguish number, gender or case. Number is denoted only when absolutely nece ary by the use of the adjectives sagala, all, and banak, many, or by sa or satu, one, with a cla ifier. As in the Chinese language, cla ifiers are numerous, such as, orang, used in speaking of persons; keping, piece, for flat things. Gender is distinguished by the use of auxiliary words. Case is indicated by position. Verbs have no person, number, mood,, or tense. Long sentences are avoided, and in a sentence first comes the subject, then the verb, followed by the object, and qualifying words, follow the words they qualify. The Arabic alphabet is used for writing Malay,, having been introduced at the time of the Mohammedan conquest. A great number of Arabic words have also been introduced into the vocabulary. The literature of the Malays consists mainly Their of proverbs, and love poems of four lines. is remarkable mainly for its independence, and the fact that it does not show influence Islam. the of The great branches of the Malayan language are the Polynesian, found in the islands of the South Pacific, the Hawaiian, the Malagasi and perhaps the Fijian, found in the Fiji Islands. As said above, the evidence of a Malayan origin for the language of Fiji and the multitudinous, dialects of Me lanes i a is not conclusive. The earliest recorded use of a Malayan lan religious literature guage for evangelistic writings was in 1662, when Brouwers, one of the Dutch Church ministers in Java, began a translation of the Bible, using Roman letters in writing it. Roman letters have become established as the alphabet for writing the Malagasi and the Polynesian Malayan languages. But in the Malaysian Islands the Arabic letters having become naturalized long before the date above named, the use of Roman letters in writing Malay has not widely found favor. 449