EARLY INDO-CHINESE INFLUENCE 



IN THE MALAY PENINSULA. 



As Illustrated by some of the 

 Dialects of the Aboriginar Tribes. 



On a visit to Burma, iu January 1892, I happened to meet 

 with a vocabulary- of the lauguac^e of Pegu, spoken by a race 

 who call themselves Mon, 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 re- 

 sembled their equivalents in the Besisi dialect of the Malay Pen- 

 insula, of which I had collected a short vocabulary from some 

 aborigines of that tribe living in Malacca territory. This coinci- 

 dence 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 lang'uages could not have led to any very satisfactory re- 

 sults 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. 



7. The words •■ aborigines '" and '• aboriginal" are used in this paper to 

 denote such of tlie 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 absoliitel}' 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. 



2. In •• Specimens of the Languages of India" published in 1874 at 

 Calcutta bv the Bengal Government. 



