2± EARLY INDO-CHINESE INFLUENCE 



Annamese I thought it as well to avoid, and I have hardly looked 

 into it at all ; first because owing- to its geographical position, both 

 past and present, it could not possibly have exercized any in- 

 fluence on the aboriginal dialects of the Peninsula and secondly 

 because it has been so deeply modified by Chinese influence, that 

 it cannot bs regarded as a typical member of the Mon-Annam 

 stock. 



The collection of materials naturally took a considerable 

 time. A g'ood many, it is true, happened to be in my possession, 

 more especially the vocabularies of the aboriginal dialects published 

 in former numbers of the Journal of the Straits Branch of the 

 Royal Asiatic Societj^, but the greater part had to be procured 

 from elsewhere. The materials are fairly numerous but their 

 value is often much reduced by the inaccuracies with which they 

 abound, the scantiness of the information they contain, and the 

 absence in many cases of anything like systematic arrangement. 

 Of the latter fault I consider Newbold's vocabulary of the "Orang 

 Benua" a glaring example: for he has evidently mixed up in one 

 list fragments of the dialects of three or four distinct tribes, thus 

 producing a language which was certainly never spoken by any 

 one aboriginal tribe that ever existed. Yet his vocabulary is 

 perhaps the fullest that is available for the study of the dialects 

 in the neighbourhood of Malacca and, in spite of its faults, is a 

 very valuable one. 



Many of the materials for the comparison of these various 

 languages and dialects are scattered about in different books 

 which are not readily accessible except to persons within reach 

 of a good library ; and the greater part of this paper was put to- 

 gether before I had been able to refer to the "Journal of the 

 Indian Archipelago" and the late Mr. J. R, Logan's numerous 

 notices of the wild tribes and their languages. A reference to 

 those notices showed me that the conclusions I had drawn from 

 the evidence I had then collected had been to some extent anti- 

 cipated by that high authority, who recognized the existence of 

 of Mon-Annam words in the dialects of the "Orang Semang" 

 and the "Orang Benua," being led thereto, curiously enoug^h, 

 by the same Besisi dialect, in which he found analogies with 

 Annamese.^ Nevertheless it seemed to me worth while to proceed 



S. V. J. LA. vol. iv,p. 345: N.S. vol.iv,p. 159: J. S. B. R. A. S. No. 7, 

 pp. 84-92. 



