Pagan races of the Malay Peninsula - Sabrizain.org

434 RELATION TO OTHER LANGUAGES part iv
finds no support In their phonology, which frequently
admits the supposed rejected finals in their own
native words. It is, too, surely more reasonable to
believe that the original sounds have persisted (as
old sounds often do persist in isolated dialects) rather
than to assume that they have been reconstructed.
These dialects have retained much that is more
archaic, by hundreds of years, than their Malay loan-
words, and it cannot therefore be considered very
remarkable that in some of these they should have
preserved the pronunciation of a few centuries ago.
Of the Malay element in the dialects of the
Peninsula it is not necessary to say more, save to
point out that it is essentially foreign to them, and
was originally foreign to the Peninsula itself. The
Malay language has been introduced into the
Peninsula from Central Sumatra, where the Malay-
speaking tribes were trained under Indian influences
into a more or less civilised condition before they
sent out the successive swarms of colonists who
made new homes for the race in the Peninsula. At
what date this colonising process began is unascer-
tained, except that it was before the final conversion
of the Malays to Mohammedanism (a process which
appears to have begun in Sumatra early in the
thirteenth century and to have been completed in
the Peninsula about two centuries later). The early
emigrations appear to have proceeded mainly from
the east coast of Central Sumatra. Subsequently to
the complete establishment of Islam in the Peninsula
there was a separate movement of colonisation from
the inland parts of the island (where the Menangkabau
dialect of Malay is spoken), directed mainly towards
the territories just inland of Malacca; but the influ-