16 LANGUAGES OF SOUTH EKN INDOCHINA. 



resemblance, in my opinion, to the fact of their having- developed 

 on what I believe was originally a Malayan soil. The true 

 explanation of the peculiarities which they share in common 

 with the Malayo-Polynesian family is, I believe, that they have 

 been formed by the synthesis of a language introduced by alien 

 immigrants from the north with the Malayan speech of a people 

 who then already occupied Southern Indo-China The 

 northern invaders must have absorbed and assimilated these 

 primitive Malayo-Polynesians and imposed upon them their alien 

 language, which in its turn has been twisted, in the mouths of 

 their mixed descendants, into something of a Malayo-Polynesian 

 form, by a process that has been aptly called ki inverse 

 attraction." 



The result of such an introduction of a strange tongue is, 

 as a rule, that it becomes modified or recast into some form 

 that comes natural to the people upon whom it is imposed : this 

 may be illustrated by such well known cases as the Pidgin Eng- 

 lish, of the China ports, Negro English, or the Malay of many 

 Chinese, Tamils and Europeans. 



In such cases the mere vocabulary, though foreign to the 

 speaker, is learnt readily enough ; but he cannot help speaking 

 his new tongue in the manner of his old one. He pronounces 

 the new words in the way that comes easiest to him and utters 

 them in what is to him the natural order, though that may not 

 be the order proper to the language as spoken by those whose 

 original speech it was. If it was natural to him to use prefixes 

 and infixes in his old language, I imagine he would be apt to 

 apply them to his acquired tongue in the same way and for the 

 same purposes. This, to my mind, is the explanation of the 

 curious fact that in Cambojan and Peguan we find these modes 

 of formation, which are so characteristic of the Malayo-Polyne- 

 sian family, while the difference of the material elements of 

 language, i.e. the words themselves, prevents us from admitting 

 an original kinship between the Mon-Annam and the Malayan 

 families of speech. 



I am afraid that this idea of the formal elements of lang- 

 uage surviving, while the native vocabulary is gradually being- 

 superseded by foreign words, may remind some people of the 

 persistence of the grin after the disappearance of the Cheshire 



Jour. Straits Branch. 



