LANGUAGES OF SOUTHERN INDO-CHINA. 15 



this last may possibly be due to the phonetic decay of a prefix 

 of the form man- or men- (the Malay me~, meng-, etc. ) : for a word 

 like mangai, " to cry " seems to presuppose an earlier manangeii 

 (Malay tangis, menangis) and ma tea h, k ' to laugh" an earlier 

 manaivah (Malay ter-tatva). The loss of a medial -n- seems more 

 probable than that of a -t- : it may be, however, that the Selung 

 in these words as in " seven " had replaced the t by /. In that 

 case these forms probably exemplify the prefix me- above. 



Selung has the suffix -kan e.g. in the word makkan (for ma- 

 bahkan, dm-bahkan or membaltkan, from ban, to "bring," Malay 

 bawa). 



The ideological order of these languages is unknown to 

 me, except that in Cham (as in the Mon-Annam languages 

 again) it appears to agree substantially with the Malay order : 

 the attributive adjective and the genitive follow the principal 

 noun, the object follows and the subject precedes the verb ; 

 but in Selung the object precedes the verb, which is very 

 strange, unless it is due to the sentences having been collected 

 through the medium of a Burmese interpreter, in speaking to 

 whom the Selungs may have cast their words into the Burmese 

 order. It is curious that Andamanese exhibits the same 

 phenomenon : but there is no evidence that the Selungs are in 

 any way connected with the Andaman islanders : both in 

 physique and in language the two races are quite distinct from 

 one another. 



I have already indicated the conclusion to which a neces- 

 sarily rather superficial comparison of these dialects seems to 

 me to point ; I regard them, or at least all of them except 

 Selung, as proof positive of the establishment on the mainland 

 of Southern Indo-China of a Malayan sub-family which must 

 date its separate existence from a period so remote as to be 

 coeval with the differentiation and dispersal of the existing 

 insular language groups of at least the V\ r estern part of the 

 Malayan Archipelago, and which formed something like a link 

 between the Sumatra, Bornean and Philippine groups. 



I think it is worth adding that the southern Mon-Annam 

 languages, which so closely resemble the Malayan in certain of 

 their structural forms, though by far the greater part of their 

 vocabulary is radically different and non-Malayan, owe this 



R. A. Soc, No. 38, 1902. 



