EARLY INDO-CHINESE INFLUENCE IN THE MALAY PENINSULA.
As Illustrated by some of the Dialects of the Aboriginal[1] Tribes.
On a visit to Burma, in January 1892, I happened to meet with a vocabulary[2] of the language of Pegu, spoken by a race who call themselves Mōn, but who are also sometimes termed Talaing. While reading casually through it my attention was arrested by several words with which I seemed somehow to be familiar, and a more careful perusal convinced me of the fact that a considerable number of the Peguan words closely resembled their equivalents in the Besisi dialect of the Malay Peninsula, of which I had collected a short vocabulary from some aborigines of that tribe living in Malacca territory. This coincidence struck me at the time as being of great interest and I determined to look into the matter more carefully on my return to the Straits. A mere comparison of the vocabularies of the two languages could not have led to any very satisfactory results and it seemed desirable to take into account as many of the other aboriginal dialects of the Malay Peninsula as I could get hold of and to include in the comparison a few other Indo-Chinese languages of cognate origin, especially the language of Camboja (Khmer) and such of the ruder dialects of the Mekong valley and southern Siam as seemed to throw any light on the subject.
- ↑ The words "aborigines" and "aboriginal" are used in this paper to denote such of the non-Muhammadan inhabitants of the Peninsula as are not, like the Chinese and Hindus, settlers who have in historical times arrived from elsewhere. It is not intended to imply that all, or any, of them were absolutely autochthonous, or even that they were the first settlers; but it is assumed, as sufficiently proved elsewhere, that their presence in the Peninsula was antecedent to the immigration of the Sumatran Malays.
- ↑ In "Specimens of the Languages of India" published in 1874 at Calcutta by the Bengal Government.
