Page:An introduction to Indonesian linguistics, being four essays.djvu/184

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172
INDONESIAN LINGUISTICS

that haunts women at childbirth : "She came quickly, in order to clutch them" = sia mělaqu-laqus {omai) tumaṅkaq isera. Old Jav. from Mpu Tanakung's Prosody: "Startled by the birds bathing (they — the gaudily-coloured fish—) flashed upwards" = S. by the birds b., flashed-up = kagyat deni ṅ paksi madyus kumĕlab.

52. Alongside of the three principal active formatives, ma-, -, -um-, there are secondary formatives. I call them so because they are less widely distributed. I would mention the following as being the most interesting of them:

I. The formative r-, which can also unite with the formative a- to form ar-, and with ma- to form mar-. Here, too, as between r- and mar- we have the same relation as in the case of - and maṅ-. This r-, just like n-, was originally an article, in Old Jav. it is an unemphatic pronoun of the third person. The shorter form r- is rare, it is found in Karo, e.g., rělbuh, "to call" < r + WB ělbuh. The longer form is spread over Sumatra, Java, Celebes, Borneo, and the Philippines. In Bug. and Mak. the formative is maq- or aq-, in Tag. mag-, in conformity with the phonetic laws already explained. — Illustrations of the active formatives r- and mar-. Karo, from the Story of the Glutton: "There is somebody calling from down below " = Calls from below hither = rĕlbuh i těruh nari. Bug., from a letter of Lasiri's to Matthes, wherein he complains that the police arrest him when he is going about by night to make enquiries for Matthes about rare Bug. words: "If it is possible, (give me a letter of attestation)" = If possible + is it = bara maqkulle i. Mak., from the anonymous collection of Mak. Dialogues: "Do not shoot so hastily !" = Not you hastily shoot = teya ko karo-karo aqmaqdiliq.

II. The formative ba-, which can also combine with the formative r- into bar-, without change of meaning. This formative is widely distributed. But as a living formative if only exists in a few languages, for example in Day., which has both ba- and bar-, and in that Sumbawarese dialect which is known to us only by the Story of the Dog's Dung. This text only contains 27 lines, and yet there are to be found in it