A grammar and dictionary of the Malay language - Wallace-online.org

DISSERTATION.
lix
ABBREVIATIONS OF CONSONANTS AND THE ASPIRATE, WITH K.
kar kr kang kah
m (jffj [m r>6n^
NIBIERAL CHARACTERS.
rm rn ran (f(3)^
mn ru^ rinn o
The phonetic character of the Javanese much resembles that
of the Malay, but still there are considerable differences. The
accent, for the most part, as in Malay, is on
Phonetic
the penultwavT-"^^^^^^®'
and, with few exceptions, no two consonants
nese.
comc togcthcr, unless one of them be a liquid or a nasal.
In Javanese the inherent vowel a is pronounced as o when it ends
a word, as is done in the Malay of the west coast of Sumatra.
The Javanese, however, goes still further, for it gives the same
sound to any preceding inherent vowels of the same word,
provided, but not otherwise, that the terminal letter be also the
inherent vowel. Thus the towns of Java, which the Malays pronounce
Sala and Surabaya, are pronounced by the Javanese,
Solo and Suroboyo, but Samarang is pronounced by a Javanese
exactly as a Malay would do. The pronunciation of the Javanese
is less soft than that of the jNIalay, and although the letters of
the alphabet be identically the same, the recurrence of nasal
sounds is much more frequent in it. To give an example, in
the Malay Dictionary I find only fifteen words beginning with
the nasal ng, and twenty with n, while in a Javanese manuscript
dictionary there are 590 beginning with the first of these
letters, and 335 with the last. Another difference affecting the
pronunciation consists in there being in Javanese a larger
proportion of words in which the liquids 1, r, w, and y, coalesce
with other consonants than in Malay.
The grammar of the Javanese is formed on the same principle
-as that of the Malay, in so far as simplicity of structure, the