used as adjective,[1] for example: rumah běsar a large house; běsar rumah the size of a house; orang banyak many folk, banyak orang the number of folk; orang pandai a clever person, pandai běsi a blacksmith. sědikit few, běbĕrapa several, sakalian, sěmua, sěgala all stand sometimes before, sometimes after the substantive; in the first case they must be parsed as substantives, in the second as adjectives. Classical usage may tend to give a word currency rather as substantive than adjective, or as adjective than substantive, but often it cannot extinguish its essential versatility. In the conversational prose of Munshi Abdillah we constantly find such examples as pĕrgi main ka-panas go playing in the heat; mĕnurut adat dan bodoh orang following the customs and folly of men, where classical usage would prefer panas and bodoh to be parsed as adjectives, but where the chipped popular phrase of the writer has caught the historical as well as the living genius of the language.
Similarly substantive and verb are not always rigidly distinguished:
sapu to wipe, sapu tangan, a pocket-handkerchief; ikat to bind, ikat pinggang a waist-bell; kata a word or to speak—maka kata Sang Nila Utama sĕmua-nya di-pĕrsĕmbahkan ka-pada Pĕrmaisuri: maka kata Pĕrmaisuri ‘Baik-lah’ all the remarks of Sang Nila Utama are reported to the queen. And the queen remarks ‘Very well’, a dual function of kata to be found everywhere in the Sejarah Melayu, that model of classical Malay. So, too, jalan a road, to travel; jala casting-net, to cast a net; pahat a chisel, to carve; kapak an axe, to cleave, are examples of words which without inflexion may be substantive or verb.
- ↑ ‘Probably adjectives neither derived nor foreign are at bottom words denoting a subject, that is a quality, and so coming in time to denote the possession of that quality.’—TENDELOO.
