Orientalist, especially the student of Sanskrit and Arabic, will of course shudder at anything but a scientific symbol; he will demand, for instance, ṅ or n̄ for ڠ and ñ for ڽ. But the student of Malay is in rather a different position. The great bulk of books on Malay, whether in the Straits Settlements or in the Netherlands Indies, have been printed by local presses, which have had no access to recondite symbols. Native readers of Romanized Malay abound; they have become used to the more slipshod way and cannot take kindly to change. And the student of Malay has to consider not only the wants of the native reader but the practice of Dutch scholars of high repute who outnumber the Englishman by twenty to one. The system adopted by the Dutch Government for the large literature of the Netherlands Indies and by Dutch scholars writing in Holland is not to be lightly regarded by other students. It is desirable that there shall be uniformity as far as possible; and it is futile for the solitary writer on Malay to pit the international scientific system against the weight of past prejudice and the current usage of two governments—for after careful consideration the Government of the Federated Malay States[1] decided to follow the Dutch line of expediency against scientific perfection. Considering that Malay is a living language of great vitality, area, and adaptability, read and written in Romanized form by children in village schools, by Straits-born Chinese, Tamils and Eurasians, by immigrants Asiatic and European; a language moreover with thousands of living Malays to guide one in pronunciation; considering this, the use of symbols is certainly impracticable and perhaps not indispensable to scholarship. ng and ny never represent divided sounds in Romanized Malay but always the letters ڠ and ڽ, so that their use need lead to
- ↑ See Romanised Malay Spelling, F.M.S. Govt. Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1904.
