Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/174

humede o. Here then a perfectly arbitrary metathesis is permitted; and as it seems to us more natural to assume that prefixes are the more primitive type of formative, we infer from this instance that infixes originated from prefixes through metathesis.
34. We have now dealt with the phonetic aspects of the formatives and turn to the further consideration of these verb-forming syllables. At the beginning of this Section we drew a distinction between formatives and auxiliary words of form. We will now supplement what we said on that subject by adding that the limits of the two concepts are often somewhat vague, inasmuch as the word of form can turn into a formative. By means of the word buah, “hit”, Day. fashions a passive formula, which is used when it is necessary to speak of pain, disadvantage, and the like; example: buah rugi, “to be damaged”, really “to be hit (by) damage”. Here buah is still felt to be an independent word, and therefore it is not joined to the substantive, in this instance rugi. But in Hova, where in conformity with phonetic law buah appears as wua, its use is no longer confined to words that denote damage, disadvantage, or the like; one can also say. for example, wuasuratra, “written”; so the root-meaning has faded, and wua is now felt to be a formative, and is written together with the WB, in this instance suratra. — Illustration from the Testament of Umbiasa: "Written in this book here" = W. in this b. this = wuasuratra amin iti taratasi iti.
35. From what has been said in the preceding paragraph it also follows that it is sometimes possible to explain the origin of the IN verbal formatives. I will give several such cases here:
I. Many formatives were originally prepositions. Thus a whole series of prepositions meaning “to, towards”, in Latin “ad, versus”, are used to form the future. In Mkb. ka, in Mal. akan (an extension of ka), in Hova hu < ku (a variant of ka), in Mak. la, in Bont. ad. In the Bont. sentence from the Story of the Stars: “Then their mother flies up to the sky” = Then flies the m. their to sky =