SOME NOTES ON THE SAKAI DIALECTS 



OF THE 



MALAY PENINSULA. 



BY 



HUGH CLIFFORD. 



" For the purpose of disclosing to us the real cha- 

 " racter of language left to itself to follow its own laws, 

 " without let or hindrance, a study of Chinese and the 

 " Turanian dialects, a study even of the jargons of the 

 " savages of Africa, Polynesia and Melanesia is far more 

 " instructive than the most minute analysis of Sanskrit 

 " or Hebrew." 



"On the Stratification of Languages." — Max Mullbr. 



HE present paper deals with some of the jargons 

 referred to by Professor Max Muller in the 

 extract from the lecture above quoted, and as the 

 dialects spoken by the largest Sakai tribes of the 

 Peninsula have hitherto practically escaped observa- 

 tion, I trust that even the scanty data in my pos- 

 session may prove of interest to the readers of this Journal. 

 I do not propose to publish at the present time an exhaustive 

 vocabulary of any of the dialects in question, as the material 

 in my possession is not, in my opinion, sufficiently complete 

 to render any publication that I could now make, of perma- 

 nent value. I venture to think, however, that as duringthe 

 last seven years I have visited many aboriginal tribes, and have 

 collected vocabularies of their dialects in several parts of the 

 Peninsula, many of the facts which I have ascertained, and the 

 conclusions to which, in my opinion, these facts point, may be 

 new and worthy of consideration by those who care for philo- 

 logical study. At some future date, when I have had further 



