The Đông Yên Châu inscription[3] is an Old Cham[4] inscription written in Pallava script, found in 1936 at Đông Yên Châu, northwest of Trà Kiệu, which used to be the old Champa capital known as Simhapura, in central Vietnam.[2] The inscription was written in prose, is the oldest document of Cham (and indeed of any Austronesian language), and testifies to the existence of indigenous beliefs among the ancient Cham people of the Champa kingdom.[5][4] Though not itself dated, the phrasing of the inscription is identical to those of dated Sanskrit inscriptions of Bhadravarman I of the second dynasty, who ruled Champa at the end of the 4th century CE.[6] It contains an imprecatory formula ordering respect for the "naga of the king", undoubtedly a reference to the protective divinity of a spring or well. This vernacular text shows that in the 4th century, the land that now constitutes modern-day central Vietnam was inhabited by an Austronesian-speaking population.[2][7] The evidence, both monumental and palaeographic, also suggests that Hinduism was the predominant religious system.[5]
The fact that the language in the inscription shares some basic grammar and vocabulary with Malay[1] has led some scholars to argue that the inscription contains the oldest specimen of Malay words in the form of Old Malay,[8][9][10] older by three centuries than the earliest Srivijayan inscriptions from southeastern Sumatra.[1] However, most scholars consider it established that this inscription was written in Old Cham instead.[4] The shared basic grammar and vocabulary comes as no surprise,[1] since Chamic and Malayic languages are closely related; both are the two subgroups of a Malayic–Chamic group[11] within the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family.
Text
The language of the inscription is not far from modern Cham or Malay in its grammar and vocabulary. The similarities to modern Malay and Cham grammar are evident in the yang and ya relative markers, both found in Cham, in the dengan ("with") and di (locative marker), in the syntax of the equative sentence Ni yang naga punya putauv ("this that serpent possessed by the king"), in the use of punya as a genitive marker, and so on. Indian influence is evident in the Sanskrit terms siddham, a frequently used invocation of fortune; nāga ("serpent, dragon"); svarggah ("heaven"), paribhū ("to insult"), naraka ("hell"), and kulo ("family").[12] The text of the inscription itself, associated with a well near Indrapura, is short but linguistically revealing:
Possibly borrowed from Vietnamese "phụ đạo", which in the past may have had the connotation of a "ruler",[14] after its literal meaning of "prince's tutor" (i.e., "king's ruler before they became a king"). The modern meaning of phụ đạo is after-school tutorials.
urāng
*ʔuraːŋ
orang
person/people
sepuy
sopan
to respect
Possibly borrowed from Sanskrit śúbh ("to beautify, to embellish, an auspicious offering") or śobhā́ ("distinguished merit").
labuh
*labuh
labuh
to drop
In modern Malay, labuh means to drop something while it's still attached (e.g., sail, anchor, curtain, skirt)[15]
^Ngọc Chừ Mai: Văn hóa Đông Nam Á. Đại học quốc gia Hà Nội, 1999, p. 121; Anne-Valérie Schweyer: Viêt Nam : histoire, arts, archéologie. Olizane, 2011, p. 424.
Abdul Rahman Al-Ahmadi (1991), "Old Malay scripts (pre-Jawi) of Champa and Srivijaya", Excerpta Indonesica, 42–48, Centre for Documentation on Modern Indonesia, Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology
Abdul Rashid Melebek; Amat Juhari Moain (2004), Sejarah Bahasa Melayu (History of the Malay language), Utusan Malaysia Publications, ISBN978-9-6761-1809-7
Bellwood, Peter; Glover, Ian (2004), Southeast Asia: From Prehistory to History, Routledge, ISBN978-0-4153-9117-7
