208 R. N. Oust — Languages of the Indo-Cliinese [Nov. 



which we shall notice further down. Sir A. Phayre states that it is uncer- 

 tain, when these first immigrant Mons arrived ; they were joined by a 

 Dravidian emigration from the Indian Peninsula, and the word Talain sur- 

 vives as a record of the Telinga connexion. 



" The Mon alphabet is of an Indian source through the Dravidian, but 

 there is little trace in the language of that connexion. Dr. Bastian (in 

 the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society) says that the Mons adopted for 

 their sole alphabet (religious and secular) the Pali alphabet, which is used 

 everywhere else for the sacred books only. There is no dictionary of the 

 language, but a vocabulary is attached to the grammar, and there are voca- 

 bularies by Crawfurd, Buchanan, Sir G. Campbell, and Hunter. The peo- 

 ple are Buddhists. Their sacred books are translated into Mon, abundantly 

 interspersed with Pali, an inflective Aryan language. There are many loan 

 Pali and Burmese words brought in by religious and secular domination. . 

 It is classed as monosyllabic, but it is impossible, in the space allotted in 

 this Report, to define with precision the transition stages of Monosyllabic 

 and Agglutinating languages. There are no changes in nouns to mark 

 their relations to other words ; this is shown only by position. Numbers 

 and genders are indicated by addition of words : tenses and moods are in- 

 adequately shown by affixes and prefixes ; frequently there is nothing but 

 the connexion to show them. The construction of the language is quite 

 different from the Burmese, the location of words being almost always the 

 reverse. This is one of the languages, whose days are numbered ; it may, 

 survive in villages, or among the emigrants settled in Siam, but Burmese 

 will supplant it in the towns. We have a translation of the New Testa- 

 ment in this language. 



" Following the coast to the limits of British Burmah, we enter the 

 province of Tenasserim. A portion is occupied by the same race of Peguans 

 and the remainder by congeners of the Burmese race, speaking a dialect of 

 that language under the name of Tavoyi or Taneagsari. A list of the 

 words of a dialect in Tenasserim called Tungtho or Thoungtii, is given by 

 Messrs. B. Hodgson and Hunter, as collected by Dr. Morton, which, ac- 

 cording to Mason, is nearly allied to Pvvo Karen, and according to Bastian, 

 had an alphabet of its own. The most southern portion of this long nar- 

 row province is only separated by a low range of hills from the kingdom of 

 Siam ; but in the mountainous tract in the corner of junction of Siam and 

 Burmah is the country of the Karens, who have obtained a notoriety from 

 their ready acceptance of some form of the Christian religion at the hands 

 of energetic missionaries, Judson, Mason, and Wade, to whom we are 

 indebted for ample linguistic information. They are three distinct tribes : 

 .the Sgan and the Pwo, and the Karenni or Kaya, or Red Karen. They 

 were •downright savages, and pagans, and many are so still. The Red 



