Memorandum on Malay transliteration
This memorandum, authored by an anonymous member of the Straits Asiatic Society (initialled “W. E. M”) who served on the Government Spelling Committee of 1878, responds to a paper on Malay transliteration published in the preceding issue of the Journal (pp. 285–286).
Summary
The author defends the 1873 Government Spelling Committee system against a critic’s alternative proposal, identifying two points of divergence: the principle governing cases where sound and spelling differ, and the treatment of the open semi-vowel sound (fathah). The Committee’s system assigns this sound to unmarked e (as in “lateral”), while the critic proposes a or unmarked e for fathah and omits the ordinary English e sound entirely (p. 285). The author further rebuts the critic’s suggestion to spell sembilan as sambilan to reflect its derivation from sa-ambil-an, arguing that the Committee was appointed to secure uniformity, not to promote philological study (p. 286). He invokes Sir William Jones’s 1784 transliteration principles as a precedent for the Committee’s approach and warns against the critic’s “ingenious but too fantastic suggestions” being mistaken for the final word on the subject (p. 286).
The critic’s footnotes (pp. 286–287) push back on both points, arguing that uniformity is an illusion given regional pronunciation variation, and that the Government system’s claimed settled status is contradicted by its own publications.