THE SAKAI AND SEMANG DIALECTS, 5] 
“rattan,” sah ‘salt,’ manuk “fowl,” kebus “dead,” hirum 
“black,” point back toa Malayan dialect other than Malay, and 
the presence of such words, relatively few though they are, in- 
evitably throws some doubt on the origin of others whose 
source, by reason of their being common to Malay and other 
Malayan languages, is necessarily a subject of uncertainty. 
The omission of these words obscures one important ele- 
ment in the constitution of the aboriginal dialects which must 
not be left out of sight in any speculation as to their origin and 
affinities. 
It is difficult to account for their presence in the aboriginal 
dialects of the Peninsula except on the assumption that they re- 
present relics of Malayan dialects locally evolved there and 
distinct from Malay itself, which isa Sumatran language not 
originally native to the Peninsula; and in that case their intro- 
duction must, it would seem, be of very ancient date, going 
back to the days when Malay had not yet become the language 
of the Peninsula; or to put the same thing in another way, 
some of these aboriginal dialects are, at any rate in part, derived 
from an independent Malayan origin going back to a remote 
antiquity. While, therefore, there can be no doubt as to the 
importance of the well-known Mon-Annam element in the 
aboriginal dialects, this very archaic Malayan element is equally 
deserving of recognition. 
These points are not without importance, for the author’s 
argument for the Mon-Annam origin of these dialects depends 
to some extent upon the percentage of Mon-Annam words 
which can be discovered in them: if therefore the aggregate 
number of words examined is unduly reduced, either by arbi- 
trary exclusion or by doubtful identifications, it is plain that 
this percentage will be overstated. As the figures stand, the 
author reduces his words to about 1250 and of these he pro- 
fesses to identify about 240, say 20 per cent, as Mon-Annam; 
The comparison is made at a later stage, and it is rather antici- 
pating matters to mention it here, but it is the main thesis of 
the article. 
Most of the identifications seem to be quite unassailable 
and even if they only account for something less than 20 per 
cent of the vocabulary, that is still a considerable achievement. 
R. A. Soc., No. 39, 1908 
