ON SIAMESE LITERATURE. 



351 



Siamese airs which accompany this paper were after a great deal of trouble 

 written out for me by a well known Malayan proficient of Penang named 

 Primus (since dead), assisted by Siamese musicians. Mr. Crawfurd I 

 believe has observed that Siamese music is pitched on a key unknown to 

 barbarous nations. 



The groundwork of the Thai prosodial system seems to me to be that 

 of the Sanscrit, although it has been modified in some measure by the 

 peculiar structure of the new medium to M^iich it has been adapted. Such 

 a system could not fail to undergo a change when forced from the service 

 of an attenuated syllabic into that of a monosyllabic language. M. De L. 

 LouBERE in his historical relation of Siam considered that if the poetry of 

 a language (*) consisting of monosyllables, and full of accented vowels 

 and compound dipthongs, consisted not in rhyme, he could not comprehend 

 how it could consist in quantity as did the Greek and Latin poems. 



The Thai language is not exactly in this predicament, for it contains 

 an inexhaustible source from which dissyllables and compound words 

 may be drawn, namely, the Sali ; but, granting that such an advan- 

 tage did not exist, the Siamese language is competent to yield 

 poetry without rhyme, and that by an artifice combining the quantity 

 employed by the Greek and Latin poets (who pronounced their 

 words either in a high, low or middle tone, or in tones intermediate 

 to these by an union of the high and low) with the accentual system 

 of the English. For as the Thai language is pronounced according 

 to a nearly invariable scheme of long and short vowels, and is assisted by 

 a powerful body of tones and accents, it is clear that it must be free from 

 any uncommon restraint of the nature alluded to. 



If again verse consists * chiefly in the arrangement of the syllables 

 * into feet, and the proper and harmonious distribution of the pauses by 

 ' means of which the recurrence or rather identity in respect of certain 

 ^ qualities of the lines or stanzas, of which the poem is composed, 



•* He here treats of Siamese language. 



