a word occurs only in a few Sanskrit and Arabic words which will be easily recognized.
(d) The representing of ي and و by i or iy and u or uw is debatable. Mr. Wilkinson[1] has put the scholar's point of view succinctly: ‘The popular spelling of tuwan as tuan and of iya as ia … suggests that the second syllable … commences with the spiritus lenis when really it begins with a w or a y. It gives an incorrect idea of the value of alif by confusing the hamzated alif with the alif of prolongation. It is also faulty for etymological study; for instance, watu is the Javanese form of batu, and the bearing of this fact on the derivation of suwatu is not suggested by the spelling suatu which implies that atu and not watu is the second portion of the word. These points may seem trivial; but the confusion imported into Malay spelling is in great measure due to the inadequate comprehension of the alphabet fostered by the belief that the spelling tuan is not a mere approximation to the sound of a certain word but is an exact transliteration of certain Arabic letters.’ The popular spelling has been followed by Mr. Wilkinson in his smaller dictionary, and by the government committee. And it can be defended from the point of view of pure phonetics. No system of spelling derivatives can be formed solely with an eye to the requirements of etymology. Phonetically, a w slips in automatically when one says tuan, unless one deliberately makes the effort to say tu’an: and the spelling tuwan is calculated to suggest a more distinct w sound than Malays actually enunciate.
(e) The most difficult problem of all is the choice of the Roman vowel, when the Malay sound lies between o and u, between e and i. The F.M.S. Government, after consideration of Peninsular dialects and of the Dutch system, has
- ↑ Wilkinson's Malay-English Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 714.
