Notes illustrating the changes which consonants undergo in passing from one Malayan dialect to another
A.M. Ferguson’s 1883 note in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society is a lexical reference cataloguing consonant correspondences across Malayan dialects, using Malay as the baseline form.
Summary
The note systematically lists how individual consonants (B, D, H, G, L, M, K, P, R, S, T) shift when a word passes from one dialect to another, with each entry pairing a Malay or near-Malay form against its cognate in a specific dialect or language (e.g., bawa → gawa in Javanese; dara → rara in Salayer) (pp. 234–239). A second section addresses metathesis, where syllable order is reversed (e.g., rusa → ursa in Battak; makan → kuman in Dyak) (p. 242). The final sections document morphological processes: prefixation (e.g., ma-, ka-, um-), decapitation (loss of an initial consonant, e.g., ram-but → buk in Bulud Opie), and contraction (e.g., darah → dah in Punan Dyak) (pp. 243–244). Ferguson explicitly cautions that single-word examples should be regarded as doubtful until corroborated by further contributions from the Society’s polyglot members (p. 233).