Aphaeresis and (Co-)Efficients

As Mr. Hawkins and the lovely Misses Tew and Ung are aware, I have been attempting to learn some Malay. The initial chapters presented no serious difficulties beyond those which any language book for beginners contain, but two features of the language struck me once I had reached Chapter V. The first, and lesser, of these features is the occasional, and occasionally rather extreme, aphaeresis of words beginning with a schwa or h and a schwa when the previous word ends in a vowel. Elision is the disappearance of a vowel before a following word which begins with a vowel; aphaeresis is the opposite effect. The reduction of hendak to ‘nak and helai to lai after a final vowel is understandable, since the schwa is never the stressed syllable in a two-syllable Malay word, and I presume that the occasional example of (pseudo-)aphaeresis before a final consonant is the result of linguistic analogy. The alternate forms present a minor difficulty to the learners who has not digested the full vocabulary and its linguistic isotopes, but the very preface of my book warns that Malay is not a book language at heart.

If I may digress for a moment to engage in linguistic geekery, the production of ’nak rather than *’ndak from the aphaeresis of hendak should not surprise; the pre-nasalized voiced plosive nd seems to require in Malay an epenthetic schwa in order to be pronounced; thus the elimination of that schwa requires a reduction of the pre-nasalized voiced plosive to either a (voiced) nasal, n, or a voiced plosive, d. Languages, such as Welsh, which face this question, appear to favor the nasal.

The other feature of Malay which struck me was the use of classifiers, which the author of my little blue-and-yellow book chooses to call coefficients. I am familiar with the concept, since Chinese possesses ‘classifiers’ and (Ancient) Middle Egyptian uses a similar system. Chinese places a classifier, which limits the possible meanings of the following monosyllabic or disyllabic word, between the numeral and the head word. Thus, the words for ‘deer’ and ‘road’, which are homonyms, are distinguished in speech by their respective classifiers. Middle Egyptian uses classifiers in the opposite way; since hieroglyphic writing only provides the consonants and omits the semantic content of the vowels, the homonyms are a visual kind (I would greatly appreciate it if anybody could provide me with the appropriate word for this phenomenon) and the scribes distinguished the senses by adding a visible but silent classifier. My experience with these languages aided me in understanding the concept of classifiers or co-efficients in Malay, but this conceptual knowledge is less useful than I would like in the practical application, especially since no dictionary of a language which uses classifiers seems to indicate the appropriate one(s) in their entries. This may be a practice akin to languages which use stress not marking this in their dictionary entries. An additional difficulty which I am experiencing in learning Malay is determining when to use a classifier and when to refrain. I trust that practice will give me a better sense of the presence or absence of this feature, although any practical advice would be received with gratitude.