Page:Prob of Siamese alphabet - Schrader - 1928.pdf/1



The review, signed J. B. in vol. XX of the Journal of the Siam Society (pp. 175178) is such a gross misrepresentation of the aim and character of my paper "Transcription and Explanation of the Siamese Alphabet" (Asia Major, 1924, pp. 45–66) that I feel it my duty to reply to it.

Let me first of all thank my critic for having enabled me to detect two errors: in my table of the ′akṣor klāṅ (p. 49) the addition "(j)" to the letter c must be cancelled; and, on p. 48, "preserved in Tibetan " should read (as is evident from the preceding) "preserved in Siamese and Tibetan." J. B. speaks of "quelques erreurs" which a knowledge of Mr. Bradley's paper "Indications of a Consonant-Shift in Siamese" etc. would have spared me, but I can find no more than the former. Nor do I see how Mr. Maspero's paper "Contribution à l'étude du système phonétique des langues Thaithaï [sic]" could have helped and not rather misled me. For the rest I need hardly assure J. B. that I should have mentioned both these papers, had they been available to me.

In the meantime my reviewer will have corrected his opinion us to my use of the term Indo-Chinese: I did not nor shall use it in the sense of the French indochinois (referring to the peoples and languages of Further India), but only in the one in which it is used (e.g. in vol. XXVI p. 929 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) as an analogue of the term Indo-European, viz., with reference to that XXI—3.