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

2 A GRAMMAR OF THE
forms, but by a slight and obvious modification of those characters whose
sounds approached the nearest to their own, and belonged to the same
oro^ans of speech ; a liberty in which they were justified by the example
of the Persians, who had not, however, occasion to carry their alterations
to the same extent.
The course of the Malayan writing, conformably to the known prac-
tice of the Hebrews, Syrians, and Arabians, is from the right hand to-
wards the left, in opposition to that of most of the people of India, and
particularly of the unconverted natives of the interior of Sumatra and
Java, whose alphabets, grounded on the principles of the Sanskrit or.
Deva-nagri, proceed, like the European, from left to right.
The letters of the Arabian alphabet, twenty-eight in number, are the
following,
and to these the Malays have added six, viz. ^ cS i_J 'i J ^, which the
learner will perceive to be judiciously formed from the cognate letters
CS^ 9 0—5 by the simple expedient of increasing the number of
diacritical points. The several names and powers of all these letters,
according to the Malayan manner of pronouncing them, will be exhibited
in the following scheme, in the arrangement of which it has been judged
more practically useful to place each of the modified characters imme-
diately after its respective original, than to reserve them, as the Malay
scribes are accustomed to do, for the conclusion of the series ; and this
order of the letters, (warranted as it is by the example of the Persians,
who place their cj next to i_j, their _ next to „, and so of the rest) is
almost indispensable to the construction and use of a Dictionary, where
the middle as well as the initial letters must follow alphabetically •,
for
it