Strangely enough, Malay is almost a grammarless tongue. It has no proper article, and its substantives may serve equally well as verbs, being singular or plural, and entirely genderless. However, adjectives and a process of reduplication often indicate number, and gender words are added to nouns to make sex allusions plain. Whatever there is of declension is prepositional as in English, and possessives are formed by putting the adjectives after the noun as in Italian. Nouns are primitive and derivative, the derivations being formed by suffixes or prefixes, or both, and one's mastery of the language may be gauged by the idiomatic way in which he handles these _Anhängsel_. Adjectives are uninflected. The use of the pronouns involves an extensive knowledge of Oriental etiquette--some being used by the natives among one another, some between Europeans and natives, some employed when an inferior addresses a superior and _vice versa_, some used only when the native addresses his prince or sovereign; and, last of all, some being distinctly literary, and never employed colloquially. Into this maze one must go undaunted, and trust to time and patience to smooth out difficulties. Verbs, like nouns, are primitive and derivative, with some few auxiliaries and a good many particles which are suffixed or prefixed to indicate various states and conditions. These things are apt to be confusing, and when the student learns that a verb may be past, present, or future without any change in form, he does not know whether to congratulate himself or not. Prepositions, too, are many and expressive; conjunctions, some colloquial, some pedantic. We now come to a peculiarity which Malay has in common with other Indo-Chinese languages--the "numeral co-efficients," as Maxwell calls them, which are always employed with a certain class of objects, just as we say "head" of horses, "sail" of ships, etc. They are very many as compared with English, and very idiomatic in their use. For instance, the Malay says, "Europeans, three _persons_," "cats, four _tails_," "ships, five _fruits_," "cocoanuts, three _seeds_," "spears, two _stems_," "planks, five _pieces_," "houses, two _ladders_," and so on to fifteen or twenty different classes of articles or objects. By some this has been regarded as a peculiarity of the languages of southeastern Asia; but the same thing may be noticed in the Indian languages of our own continent.