Also language__Javanese (Krama)) serat ‘letter’. Most of this comparison is due to borrowing, ultimately from language__Malay. Dempwolff (1938) reconstructed *surat ‘writing’, and Blust (1976:33) noted that “Since all reported ‘indigenous’ scripts in Indonesia and the Philippines ... appear to be based on Indian originals, there is no known physical reason to suppose a pre-Indian tradition of ‘bamboo literacy’. *surat is not a Sanskrit loanword, however, invariably and exclusively refers to writing, and must have existed in western Indonesia only slightly later than the earliest inscriptions in an Indian-based script. It therefore seems unlikely that writing was introduced to Indonesia entirely as a result of direct or stimulus diffusion from India.”

Whatever the origin of this word, it now seems safest to assume that it came to refer to writing in the Malay world only after the introduction of Indic scripts. What is most remarkable is its occurrence (with irregular sound correspondences) in several Formosan languages, presumably as a result of the Dutch commericial and proselytizing presence in southwest Taiwan from 1624-1661. Since the short-lived Dutch colonization of Taiwan was staged from Batavia it is very likely that it would have included language__Malay speakers, and one can only assume in the absence of direct historical evidence that some of these Malays introduced elements of literacy to the Siraya. However, the historical records we have indicate that the earliest Dutch contact with Taiwan in October, 1623, was a fleet under the command of Cornelis Reyerson that included “a small following of soldiers and Bandanese slaves”, but apparently no Malays (Blusse and Roessingh 1984:66). Nonetheless, the observations that were made of the Siraya-speaking Soulang village claim that the population at that time already used “many language__Malay words”. While this can be interpreted as meaning only that the Dutch recognized language__Siraya cognates of language__Malay words they already knew -- much as they did two decades earlier in stating that there was “much of language__Malay in language__Malagasy” -- several cited forms are distinctively language__Malay, and not language__Siraya, as with babij ‘pig’, tacot ‘afraid’, boesoek ‘rotten’, maccan ‘to eat’, or ican ‘fish’. Some of the Dutch in this contingent speculated that these words might have been introduced by Malay sailors from Johore who had preceded them in reaching southwest Taiwan, but this raises the question why similar contacts would not have happened along the west coast of northern Luzon. The presence of sulal in language__Kavalan is more plausibly attributed to contact with language__Tagalog speakers who accompanied the Spanish during their even briefer colonization of northeast Taiwan from 1626-1642.

Finally, the forms in some of the languages of Sulawesi, as language__Bare'e and language__Tae' suggest that language__Malay surat may have arisen from language__PWMP *suRat ‘to carve, incise’, and spread widely during the apogee of Sriwijaya after undergoing semantic change. A connection with language__PWMP *suRat ‘wound’ seems less likely.