LANGUAGES OF SOUTHERN INDO-CHINA. 25 



with all deference, I venture to say that this is indeed a bold 

 theory. His chief argument, apparently, apart from the afore- 

 said Malay loan wards, is that Fu-nan (or Pu-nam), the old 

 name for the country now called Siam, is capable of being- 

 explained by a Siamese derivation which M. Schlegel invents for 

 it : unfortunately all monosyllabic languages lend themselves 

 only too easily to hypothetical derivations of that kind ; and 

 that its people, in the early centuries of the Christian era, are 

 described by Chinese chroniclers as being " ugly and black" 

 with " curled hair," resembling", the Professor himself says, the 

 Semangs. On the strength of this he assumes the Siamese to be 

 Malayan. Everyone who has been to the Far East should know, 

 and M. Schlegel can hardly have forgotten, that the Siamese 

 are several shades fairer and the Semangs several shades darker 

 than the average Malay complexion : and that neither Siamese 

 nor Malays have curled or curly hair. His argument compels 

 M. Schlegel to deny the historically certain fact that the Thai, 

 that is the present Siamese, are comparatively recent arrivals 

 from the interior of Northern Indo-China ; and he entirely 

 overlooks the essential unity of their language with that of the 

 Laos, Shans, etc., right away to the Khamti on the eastern 

 border of Assam and a string of tribes in southwestern China. 

 If the Siamese spoken to-day at Bangkok is at bottom a Malay- 

 an language, so must be the languages of all these northern 

 tribes, for they are substantially the same and cannot be severed 

 from one another. That appears to me to be an exceedingly 

 large conclusion to draw from a few Malay loan words to be 

 found in modern Siamese, and I am convinced that it will be 

 repudiated both by Siamese and Malay Scholars with tolerable 

 unanimity. 



Of course the possibility that there is a Malayan element 

 in the blood of the modern Siamese of the South is not thereby 

 excluded : that there should be such an element is an almost 

 necessary consequence if the main argument of the foregoing 

 paper has anything in it. But apart from modern intermixture 

 which the difference of religions keeps at a minimum, it can 

 only have come in at second hand through the Pegunn or 

 Cambojan inhabitants who occupied Siam before the Thai con- 

 quered it. That, however, is a very different matter from the 



R. A. Soc, No. 3S, 1902. 



