14 SOME NOTES ON THE SAKAI DIALECTS. 



opportunities of perfecting and completing my grammar and 

 vocabularies of Sakai dialects, I hope to be able to publish 

 them in a form which will be more thorough and satisfactory 

 than any which I could now attempt, and I shall, therefore, 

 restrict myself in the present paper to a few notes on these 

 dialects, and their connection with Malay. 



In the same way, and for the same reasons, I shall not 

 attempt to embody in this article any facts concerning the 

 Semang or Pangan, as the Negritos proper are variously called 

 by the Malays, and even in the Sakai dialects, I shall deal 

 chiefly with the Sen-oi dialect, which is that with which I have 

 the more intimate acquaintance, and which appears to be the 

 purest form of Sakai extant. 



Before going any further, however, it is necessary to clearly 

 state that the aborigines of the Peninsula consist of people of 

 two distinct races. The first, or Sakai, are a light-coloured, 

 slenderly built people with the w T avy, abundant hair, and in 

 many cases the drooping nose of the Polynesian. The second, 

 or Semang, who are true Negrito, are short, dark and thickset, 

 with woolly hair, flat features, thick lips and general Negro 

 characteristics. The former have attained a degree of civiliza- 

 tion which is far superior to anything which the Negrito have 

 reached. Sakai live in houses, and plant as well as hunt. The 

 Negrito lives by his bow and blow-pipe alone, and lives in a 

 temporary lean-to shed in spots where game is most plentiful. 

 The Sakai affects to look down upon the Negrito, while the 

 latter is a happy-go-lucky, cheery, little hunter who looks down 

 on nobody. 



The Sakai tribe is now split up into innumerable clans, each 

 consisting of a few families, living in places surrounded by the 

 Malays, and thus cut off from intercommunication with one 

 another. These small clans, as might be anticipated, show 

 many signs of the influence exerted over them by their Malay 

 neighbours in their language and customs, and though it is 

 comparatively rare to find them embracing the Muhammadan 

 faith, still their civilization is more advanced, and they them- 

 selves are more degenerate than their brothers the Sakai of 

 the far interior. There is a clan of Sakai in Kuantan (Pahang) 



