90 TRIBES INHABITING PENANG AND PROVINCE WELLESLEY. 



they founded the Assam rule, a large part of Manipar and the ter- 

 ritory now known as the Shan States, their language and civiliza- 

 tion had been considerably modified by the influence of the Chinese 

 It was not till many centuries later that they succeeded in expel- 

 ling the Kambojans from the lower basin oE the Menam and reach- 

 ing the sea. From Siam they spread down the Peninsula, and all 

 the Malay States appear to have successively been forced or per- 

 suaded to acknowledge their suzerainty. At the end oE last cen- 

 tury, the inhabitants of the territory between Siam and Kedah. were 

 almost purely Siamese. In 1321, they expelled the Malay Chiefs 

 and the greater part of the Malay population from Kedah and 

 occupied that country until about 1842, when it was restored to its 

 Native rulers, but as a dependency on Siam. The Southern pro- 

 gress of the race led to parties of Siamese settling in various parts 

 of Kedah and in the N.E. districts of Province Wellesley, in which, 

 Siamese was till lately, and is still to a considerable extent, the 

 current language of the oldest settlers, being Samsam. /.e.,Islamised 

 descendants of Siamese with some intermixture of Malay blood. 



The Siamese language is radically Himalaic, but owing chiefly, it 

 is probable, to the influence of Chinese, it has been transformed, 

 like some of its sister tongues, from a dissyllabic to a monosyllabic 

 structure. Kemnants of the Himalaic prefixes are found in the 

 initial consonants of several words. The forms of the common 

 Himalaic vocables are often broader and more consonantal in 

 Siamese and the sister Mon-Anam languages than in the Tibeto- 

 Burman, and they retain a similar Archaic character in many of the 

 Malayo-Polynesian vocabularies. 



These brief notes will be rendered more intelligible by a refer- 

 ence to the general history of the linguistic family to which the 

 anguages of the Papuans, the Binua, the Malays, and the Siamese 

 alike belong. 



The Archaic-Himalayo-Polynesian formation was related to the 

 Scythic on the one side and the Chinese on the other. It possess- 

 ed a system of minutely differentiated formatives and pronouns and 



