IN THE MALAY PENINSULA. 43 



Apart from the fact that in the case of some of the tribes, the 

 weig-ht of ethnological facts, so far as they can affect a 

 philological question, tends to oppose such a conclusion, it must 

 be remembered that the words that have been shown to be of 

 Indo-Chinese origin constitute but a small portion of the 

 vocabulary of the aborigines. There is nothing to prove that 

 the basis of their languages is not entirely distinct and that the 

 Mon-Annam words are not merely adopted, like the Sanskrit 

 words in Malay, and grafted on to their primitive dialects. 

 Partial identity of vocabulary proves historical contact but not 

 necessarily family relationship among languages, and in comparing 

 them the structure must be considered as well as the bare 

 materials. 



Now as regards the syntactical structure of these dialects 

 very little evidence is forthcoming, and until a careful examination 

 has been directed to that point it will be impossible to classify 

 them with absolute certainty in any family of languages. 

 M. Terrien de Lacouperie in " The Languages of China before 

 the Chinese," enters somewhat fully into the varieties of 

 ideological structure in different languages and points out the 

 importance of duly considering the order of words in a sentence 

 in languages, where that order is practically fixed and where in 

 the absence of inflection or a developed form of agglutination, 

 there is nothing- but the syntactical structure and the identity of 

 root-words to guide us in comparing different groups. He 

 mentions incidentally^^ that the ideology of the "Semaug" can 

 be expressed by the formula 1, 4, 5, 8, III., that is to say : 



1. — Genitive precedes noun. 

 4. — Adjective follows noun. 

 5. — Object precedes verb. 

 8. — Verb follows subject. 

 III. — Subject object verb is the normal order 

 of the sentence. 



1 do not know whence he derives his information as to this 

 point, for he quotes no authority, and some doubt remains there- 

 fore as to what particular tribe he denotes by the term "Semang," 

 but from the context it is plain that some of the Peninsular 

 Negritos are intended. 



^8. op. cit. p. 75. (note 2). 



