168 FROM CENTRAL INDIA TO POLYNESIA. 



too much space to discuss them here. Finally, in an 

 appendix he gives over 200 groups of words in which in his 

 opinion a comparison between the " Austroasiatic " and the 

 Malayo-Polynesian' (or, as he proposes to style them, " Austro- 

 nesian") forms shows an identity of root. 



With regard to these verbal comparisons, I must: say that 

 while some of them are not at first sight very convincing, yet 

 there is a considerable proportion where the analogy is so 

 striking that one can hardly attribute it to mere chance coin- 

 cidence. In compiling the comparative vocabulary of aborig- 

 inal dialects contained in "Pagan Races of the Malay Penin- 

 sula" I was often struck by the curious analogies presented by 

 Malay words on the one hand and Mon-Khmer words on the 

 other, so that in some cases it seemed impossible to decide 

 with which set of languages a given aboriginal word was most 

 closely connected. In No. 38 of this Journal I had ventured 

 tentatively to account for the occurrence of similar words in 

 Malayan languages and Mon and Khmer by the suggestion that 

 they might be ancient Malayan loanwords in the Mon-Khmer 

 languages, derived by them from the now extinct Malayan 

 dialects of Southern Indo-China. That such loanwords do 

 exist there can be no doubt; but I now see that this ex- 

 planation is quite inadequate. It cannot account for the large 

 number of analogies pointed out by Professor Schmidt in his 

 last paper, especially now that Khasi and Munda have been 

 brought into the comparison. For here, surely, Malayan in- 

 fluence is quite excluded. Thus the Bahnar word toley, "rope ", 

 might well be suspected of being a mere Malayan loanword 

 (from the Cham lalsi)', but when we find tyllai in Khasi, we 

 no longer feel able to account for the latter form in this way 

 and may even have our doubts about the Bahnar word. On 

 the other hand Professor Schmidt concedes that the Bahnar 

 donau, "lake^", may well be a loanword from the Malayo-Poly- 

 nesian languages : he has not succeeded in finding it in other 

 Mon-Khmer languages. I may suggest that it comes from the 

 Cham danau. 



I think there can be no objection to my giving a small 

 selection from the 215 instances in Professor Schmidt's ap- 



Jour. Straits Branch 



