1877.] Feninsula and tJie Indian Archipelago. 207 



Rakheng is applied to the language of the inhabitants o£ Arracan, from the 

 Pali word meaning ' abode of demons.' The hill tribes are pagan and 

 savages, and, with the exception of the Khyeng, we have little knowledge 

 of their language. They are the same as those alluded to by name in our 

 last year's paper as on the frontier of Chittagong, the Mrung, Kumi, and 

 Mru. Latham calls them the tribes of the Eiver Koladyn or Kaladan, the 

 limit of Kalas, the term by which they call all foreigners, quoting from a 

 notice of them under that name by Latter in the Journal of the Bengal 

 Asiatic Society. Their numbers, features, and relative relation to each 

 other, and to Burmese, has still to be determined ; they have no written 

 character, and will probably in the progress of civilization disappear. A 

 vocabulary of these dialects is given in an appendix to Captain Lewin's 

 Hill Tracts of Chittagong, 1869. Sir A. Phayre and Mr. Bryan Hodgson 

 describe them in J. A. S. B. 



" Of one language, the Khyeng or Hiou, spoken by a people who are 

 pagans, but the most extensively diffused in the great Western Mountain 

 range of Burmah, and who are settling down to regular agriculture, we 

 have a satisfactory grammatical memorandum by a Member of our Society, 

 Major G. E. Fryer, who occupies the post of Deputy Commissioner of the 

 District of Sandoway, in which they are included. This language may be 

 classed as in the first stage of agglutination ; the tones are very elaborate, 

 but the construction simple. Attached to these notes is a vocabulary : 

 there is no written character, no literature, and, with the exception of 

 notices and vocabularies in the Asiatic Researches and in the J. A. S. B., 

 in which also Major Pryer's note appeared, we have no further information. 



" Passing down the coast we come to the delta of the great river of 

 Burmah, the Irawadi. This has, from prehistoric times, been occupied by 

 a race separate in language from the Burmese ; the race is known as Talain, 

 the language as Peguan or Mon, and the province as Pegu. They had 

 their day of greatness, but within the last century were overpowered by the 

 Burmese, who occupy the middle regions of the Irawadi, and during* their 

 time of power tried to exterminate this language, which has, however, 

 revived, since, in 1853, Pegu became a British Province, and Rangoon the 

 capital of British Burmah. 



" Dr. Mason and Sir A. Phayre have stated their opinion in favour of 

 a connexion linguistically between the Mon and the language of the Hos 

 or Koles, on the other side of the Bay of Bengal, in the Western District 

 of Bengal. This is one of the hard questions of Philology and Ethnology. 

 We have an excellent grammar of the language, by the late Rev. Mr. 

 Haswell, a Protestant Missionary, who does not agree in this theory. 

 Moreover, a connexion is asserted linguistically, by the late Dr. Logan, 

 between the Mon and the Annamite language, on the confines of China, 



