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Many of the devices adopted by the Prince to accomplish this end were not only illogical, but clumsy in the extreme; and there are many duplications among them. But since his time ั and ึ are the only characters that have actually been added to the vowel list. A few unnecessary อ's have been dropped, but quite as many unnecessary ones have been added. The shift of a number of the vowel signs from the line to the space above or below (see next paragraph) has caused some change in the order of letters in the syllable. But in the main, for its peculiar system of representing vowels and diphthongs, the Siamese of to-day must thank the Prince.
But the most original as well as the most interesting feature Position in the line. of his scheme of vowel-notation was his bringing of all the vowel-signs into the written line along with the consonants, and so practically into the alphabet itself. Inclusion of the vowels in the alphabet was a master stroke of the Greek genius, when once for all it adapted oriental letters to the needs of a new world of life and thought. It is that alone, for example, which has made possible for all western tongues the immense advantage of a perfectly fixed order of words in vocabularies and lists. The lack of such an absolute word-order is a difficulty and hindrance to scholarship more or less distinctly felt throughout the Eastern world, and everywhere for the same reason:—the vowels have no place in the alphabetical order. Prince Ram Khămhæng, so far as we can learn, is the only man in all this interval who has come at all near to duplicating that old Grecian thought. But he did not carry his thought through to its logical conclusion. He did not give the vowels their place in the sequence of elements in the syllable, as he had given them their place in the line. Siamese scholars, unlike the Greek, were continually conning oriental scriptures. They thus kept ever alive the old tradition, and obscured the new. Very few years passed before the vowels which had been brought into the line were back in their old stations in the field[1]. Thus it is that for Siamese of to-day, type that
- ↑ There is quite a series of the Sukhothai inscriptions, following this of Prince Ram Khamhæng; but in none of them, so far as I can ascertain, do the vowels retain their places in the line. I find it difficult to accept Père Schmitt's conclusion from this fact (Mission Pavie, II:177) that the reduction of the vowels to the line was no part of the Prince's scheme, but rather a mere variation introduced by the stone cutter who "a voulu faciliter par là son travail, et donner de la netteté à ses caractères." Such presumption in dealing with his master's pet invention is hardly to be expected on the part of a workman who might be sure that his meddling would not escape his master's scrutiny.
