One word in the first place on the character used
by the various dialects. When they accepted the
lessons of the Persian and Arabian missionaries, the
Malays adopted their alphabet. This detestable in-
strument, which certainly makes half the difficulty of
the Turkish, Persian, Hindustani, and Arab languages,
this alphabet, destitute so to speak of vowels, and full
of aspirates, of guttural sounds, of emphatic articula-
tions, is ill suited to an idiom as sonorous as Spanish,
as soft as Italian and Portuguese. The other peoples



The Malayo-Polynesian Languages. 143

of the family have made use of an old Hindu character.
The alphabet of the Javanese is agreeable to the eye
and points to a true sense of art among them ; but
their representation of the vowels is very singular ; to
give only one example : the sound is expressed by
two characters, of which one precedes and the other
follows the consonant. The Tagala and Bisaya alpha-
bet, which is incomplete in the vowels, has a certain
strange grace. That of the Battaks is very ugly, as
becomes a nation among whom literary cultivation has
not put an end to cannibalism, which has become, on
the contrary, a legal institution. One would not wish
the Malays to adopt such a character, but their language
"would profit much from the use of the Latin alphabet,
which is so obviously suited to it.
The introduction of Islamism has not flooded Malay
with Arabic to the same extent as other Mussulman
idioms. About a hundred and sixty Arabic words
are reckoned, and there are about thirty Persian ones.
