A grammar of the Malayan language, with an introduction and praxis..

134 A GRAMMAR OF THE
rhymes with the fifth, the second with the sixth, the third with the
seventh, and the fourth with the eighth.
To those who cannot read tlie Malayan words with sufficient fluency
to judge of the measure, will acquire no inadequate idea of it, as well as
of the cadence, from the following doggerel stanza, altered from the
well-known original, for the purpose of exemplifying the weak syllable at
the end of every line.
Mild Ar I
cadians | ever | blooming,
Nightly j slumbering j o'er your | cattle,
Far I
See j my ig | noble | days con ] suming
distant j from the | fields of | battle.
Of Rhyme.
It remains now to make a few observations on the subject of rhyme,
esteemed a necessaiy part of the constructure of Malayan verse. What-
ever advantages may attend its use in other languages (and though diffi-
cult to account for, its pleasing effect can scarcely be denied), they are
here much weakened by the circumstance of the lines terminating with
unaccented syllables, and its being held sufficient that in these alone
(especially in serious poems) the resemblance of sound should take place,
without any regard to the preceding accented syllables of the same words.
The rules of this art, as of many others, are theoretically borrowed from
the Arabian poetry, but as the words of that copious and energetic
language, as well as of the Persian, frequently end with a strong syllable,
those rules have no practical application to Malayan verse.
The rhymes most frequently occurring are those of the short or sup-
plementary vowels, with which so large a proportion of the words con-
clude