spelling of Malay in Arabic characters, at the very beginning of the seventeenth century, a standard obtaining in many different places in the Malayan Archipelago. The introduction of this foreign alphabet was a direct consequence of the conversion of Malays to Islam. The earliest and most important missionary centre was N. Sumatra, which strictly was not Malay in speech, though Malay was used for commerce, literature, and religion; most of the old Malay MSS. were written there and von de Wall alludes to eja acheh Achinese spelling as the original style. A system of spelling there adopted naturally would spread with the spread of Islam to the rest of Sumatra, the coasts of Borneo, the Moluccas, to Malay settlements in Java and at Malacca. But it is possible that something more than repetition and imitation went to account for the uniformity of system. ‘If the Arabs had attempted to make an adaptation of their own system of spelling to suit the peculiarities of the Malay language, the result would have been that in different parts of the Archipelago there would have been different modifications of the Arabic spelling, and a variety of Malay spellings would have been unavoidable. The uniformity in the spelling of the earliest MSS. would lead us therefore to expect that the system of orthography according to which the Arabs originally began to write the Malay language and which they taught subsequently to the Malays, was the same as they themselves used in writing their own language.’ Certainly in the main they did attempt to apply Arabic principles.
The notes of the early seventeenth-century system[1] were:
(a) The use of vowel points: at any rate they were used on unusual words at their first occurrence in a work, so that بَدَنُل Badanul, a proper name, is fully vowelled on its first mention in the Bodleian Sri Rama but not subsequently.
- ↑ Cp. Shellabear's ‘Evolution of Malay Spelling’, J.R.A.S., Straits Branch, xxxvi. 75-135.
