LANGUAGES OF SOUTHERN INDO-CIIINA. 17 



cat. But the real analogy is to be found in those petrifactions 

 where every cell and fibre of the original wood or other sub- 

 stance are in course of time accurately reproduced by the stony 

 deposit that replaces them. To drop figures of speech, which, 

 however apt, can never be conclusive, when one considers that 

 the Malayan languages readily adopt foreign words and ins- 

 tinctively, fit them up with Malayan prefixes and suffixes, one 

 can almost see the beginnings of such a process as I have indi- 

 cated : words like ka-raja-an, ber-akal or even di-report-kan 

 (which last can be heard any day when a Malay police officer 

 reads from his Station report book in a Police Court) are in- 

 stances taken at random, where a Sanskrit, Arabic or English 

 loan word has been subjected to this treatment. 



One has only to carry the idea out to its logical conclusion 

 and imagine a Malayan language gradually allowing its native 

 vocabulary to be superseded, more or less completely, by 

 foreign loan words, and the result would be much the same as 

 what we now find in southern Indo-China. If the process were 

 arrested half-way, a fairly evenly mixed vocabulary would be 

 formed, like that of Cham ; a more advanced stage of change 

 would result in something like Cambojan ; while a thorough 

 application of the same principle might end in producing a 

 language like Peguan, where only a very small percentage of 

 words is to be found which show any signs of kinship with the 

 Malayan family. Nevertheless the ideological order of these 

 languages, that is to say the order of words in a sentence, is 

 substantially the same as in the Malayan languages* and the 

 same system of prefixes and infixes (though not, apparently, of 

 suffixes) still survives. 



On the other hand a strong tendency is noticeable, of which 

 it has been shown that even Achinese (Malayan language) 

 exhibited the beginnings, to contract disyllabic words into mono- 

 syllables or at least into quasi-monosyllables, in which one of 

 the two syllables is almost suppressed. There are also other 



- There is reason to believe that in this respect the Mon-Annani 

 languages did not differ originally from the Malayan. 



3 * 



R. A. Sue, No. 38, 1902. 



