SECTION VI

ON THE INDO-CHINESE BORDERERS

AND THEIR CONNECTION WITH

THE HIMALAYANS AND TIBETANS.

To the Secretary of the Asiatic Society.

SIR,-In further prosecution of my purpose of recording in the pages of our Journal a complete set of comparative vocabularies on an uniform plan, I have now the honour to transmit to you two fresh series, one for Arrakan, and the other for the Tenasserim provinces. The first comprises six tongues, viz., the Burmese, the Khyeng, the Kámi, the Kúmi, the Mrú, and the Sák; the second five, viz., the Burmese, the Talien, the Túng-lhú, the Shán, and the Siamese.

It is needless, I presume, to apologise for thus recording provincial dialects of well-known languages such as the Burmese and Siamese, because such deviations of a known kind afford inestimable means of testing those which are unknown, and of thus approximating to a just appreciation of the interminable varieties of speech that characterise the enormously-extended family of the Mongolidæ.

I am indebted for these vocabularies to Captain Phayre, whose name is a warrant for their authenticity, and who has kindly added to their value by the subjoined explanatory note upon the Arrakan tribes. On those of the Tenasserim provinces the only elucidatory addition is the important one that the Túng-lhú are "Hillmen," that is, dislocated aborigines driven to the wilds, or, in other words, broken and dispersed

tribes, like the Khyeng, and Kámi, and Kúmi, and Mrú, and Sák of Arrakan, whose vocables constitute the greatest part of the first half of the vocabularies herewith forwarded.

In the course of recording in our Journal these numerous vocabularies, I have purposely avoided any remarks on the affinities they suggest or demonstrate, intending to take up that subject when they should be completed; but the high interest excited by my Himálayan series, in connection with the bold and skilful researches which are now demonstrating the unparalleled diffusion over the earth of that branch of the human family to which the Himalayans belong, has induced me on the present occasion to deviate partially from that rule, and to at once compare Captain Phayre's Arrakanese vocables with my own Himálayan † and Tibetan ones. Having been so fortunate as lately to procure an ample Sifánese series, comprising the tongues of the several peoples bordering on China and Tibet between Konkonúr and Yúnán, and having, moreover, made some progress in a careful analysis of a normal and of an abnormal sample of the Himálayan tongues, with a view to determining the amounts of the Turánian and Arian elements, I shall ere long find occasion to recur to the general affinities of the Indian Mongolidæ. In the meanwhile, the subjoined comparison of several Arrakanese tongues with those of Tibet and of the Eastern Himalaya will be read with surprise and pleasure by many who, accustomed to regard the Himalayans as Hindus, and the Indo-Chinese, like the Chinese, as distinct from the people of Asie Centrale, and from the Tibetans, will be astonished to find one type of language prevailing from the Káli to the Koladân, and from Ladakh to Malacca, so as to bring the Himalayans, Indo-Chinese, and Tibetans into the same family.

That such, however, even in the rigid ethnological sense, is the fact will hardly be denied by him who carefully examines the subjoined table, or the documents from which it is taken, because not only are the roots of the nouns and verbs similar

Latham's History of Man and Ethnology of British Colonies.

+ My own Himalayan series will be found in the Journal, No. 185, for December 1847. The Arrakanese series is annexed hereto.