Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalofstra25271894roya).pdf/517

 EARLY INDO-CHINESE INFLUENCE IN THE MALAY PENINSULA.

On a visit to Burma, in January 1892, I happened to meet with a vocabulary of the language of Pegu, spoken by a race who call themselves Mōn, but who are also sometimes termed Talaing. While reading casually through it my attention was arrested by several words with which I seemed somehow to be familiar, and a more careful perusal convinced me of the fact that a considerable number of the Peguan words closely resembled their equivalents in the Besisi dialect of the Malay Peninsula, of which I had collected a short vocabulary from some aborigines of that tribe living in Malacca territory. This coincidence struck me at the time as being of great interest and I determined to look into the matter more carefully on my return to the Straits. A mere comparison of the vocabularies of the two languages could not have led to any very satisfactory results and it seemed desirable to take into account as many of the other aboriginal dialects of the Malay Peninsula as I could get hold of and to include in the comparison a few other Indo-Chinese languages of cognate origin, especially the language of Camboja (Khmer) and such of the ruder dialects of the Mekong valley and southern Siam as seemed to throw any light on the subject.