56 THE SAKAI AND SEMANG DIALECTS. 
of Sakai, represented in its purest form by the Sénoi dialect. 
This erroneous view has perhaps tended to discourage the 
collection of the other dialects, which has been stigmatized as 
useless except for the purpose of studying the progressive decay 
of the language. It is evident, however, that Sénoi, though no 
doubt on the whole the purest type of its own class of Sakai, 
cannot be called upon to explain all the other dialects, some of 
which appear to be in some respects nearer to the ancient 
forms. 
I need say nothing of the author’s further comparison with 
the numerals of two Borneo dialects given in Mr. Ling Roth’s 
work on Sarawak, as Mr. Ray (in “Man” 1902, No. 42) has shown 
that one of these so-called Borneo dialects is really a Sakai 
dialect of Perak collected by the late Mr. Brooke Low, while 
the resemblance of the other is very slight and clearly 
fortuitous. 
After pointing out that a fair number of words (some 50 or 
so, and all or nearly all of them of Mon-Annam origin) run 
through almost all the dialects, the author next proceeds to 
analyse the lists where they differ, with a-view to discovering 
the relationship of the various dialects znter se and establishing 
a classification of them into groups. Considering the paucity of 
the materials for many of the dialects, this is really a brilliant 
piece of work, to which justice could be done only by going into 
details for which there is no space in this notice. The upshot of 
it is that the dialects of the Peninsula, so far as they are here re- 
presented, fall into the following groups :— 
I. Sémang. 
G) A relatively pure Sémang (and Pangan) group, curi- 
ously homogeneous though covering a large tract of 
country and extending from Northern Kédah to 
southern Kélantan ; 
(ii) Another Sémang group, less pure than the preceding, 
represented by (a) the ‘“‘Jooroo” (Juru) Sémang of 
the authorities, (b) the dialect given by Begbie (and 
Ton:lin) and (c) certain words in Newbold’s ‘“Benua” 
list: apparently to be regarded as “low country” Sé- 
mang as opposed to the purer dialects of the interior 
hills. : 
Jour. Straits Branch 
