eposition
should equally require an appropriate case, and as well as of, to, and
from, we should have a case for deatas rumah, on top of the house. So of
verbs: kallo saya buli jalan, If I could walk: this may be termed the
preter-imperfect tense of the subjunctive or potential mood of the verb
jalan; whereas it is in fact a sentence of which jalan, buli, etc. are
constituent words. It is improper, I say, to talk of the case of a noun
which does not change its termination, or the mood of a verb which does
not alter its form. A useful set of observations might be collected for
speaking the language with correctness and propriety, but they must be
independent of the technical rules of languages founded on different
principles.*

(*Footnote. I have ventured to make this attempt, and have also prepared
a Dictionary of the language which it is my intention to print with as
little delay as circUmstances will admit.)

INTERIOR PEOPLE USE LANGUAGES DIFFERENT FROM THE MALAYAN.

Beside the Malayan there are a variety of languages spoken in Sumatra
which however have not only a manifest affinity among themselves, but
also to that general language which is found to prevail in, and to be
indigenous to all the islands of the eastern sea; from Madagascar to the
remotest of Captain Cook's discoveries; comprehending a wider extent than
the Roman or any other tongue has yet boasted. Indisputable examples of
this connexion and similarity I have exhibited in a paper which the
Society of Antiquaries have done me the honour to publish in their
Archaeologia, Volume 6. In different places it has been more or less
mixed and corrupted, but between the most dissimilar branches an evident
sameness of many radical words is apparent, and in some, very distant
from each other in point of situation, as for instance the Philippines
and Madagascar, the deviation of the words is scarcely more than is
observed in the dialects of neighbouring provinces of the same kingdom.
To render this comparison of languages more extensive, and if possible to
bring all those spoken throughout the world into one point of view, is an
object of which I have never lost sight, but my hopes of completing such
a work are by no means sanguine.

PECULIAR WRITTEN CHARACTERS.

The principal of these Sumatran languages are the Botta, the Rejang, and
the Lampong, whose difference is marked not so much by the want of
correspondence in the terms as by the circumstance of their be