Study On Malay Sanskrit Loanwords

As the official language of Malaysia,Malay has been influenced by foreign cultures for a long time and continuously borrowed words and expressions from foreign languages in its process of formation and development.The exchanges between the ancient Malay Peninsula and India began in BC,and the former has undergone an "Indian period"(overall influenced by India,including culture,language,customs etc.)for nearly a thousand years.The ancient Malay inscriptions in the 7th century AD are the best corpus for studying the Sanskrit loan words in Malay.The ancient Malay establishes its writing system based on the Sanskrit language and adopts many Sanskrit loan words.There are four ancient Malay inscriptions in which they were written in Palava and the proportion of Sanskrit words has reached 45%.However,as other loan words “intrude” Malay,the proportion of Sanskrit loan words is increasingly decreasing.Even so,there are still some abstract expressions stemming from Sanskrit loan words in such aspects as religions,politics and social life.Till now,Sanskrit affixes are still capable of combining with lots of contemporary Malay words and forming some buzzwords which are more accurate.