Pagan races of the Malay Peninsula - Sabrizain.org

CHAP. Ill CULTURE WORDS 451
word for " liute," which has a different prefix from its
Mon-Khmer equivalents (some of which differ amongst
themselves) and may have been newly formed from a
common verbal root. But nevertheless there is here
sufficient evidence that some at least of the aboriginal
tribes of the Peninsula do not owe their primitive
agriculture and general semi-civilisation to Malay in-
fluences exclusively, but must have retained them at
least from the time (now some eight or nine centuries
back if not more) when they were finally cut off from
all relations with the Mon - Khmer civilisation of
Southern Indo-China.
Therefore I cannot agree with Martin when he
suggests that the Sakai house on piles is borrowed
from the Malay style of architecture/ or that the
planting of cereals, especially rice, is due to Malay
influence.' The house on piles is the typical structure
in the greater part of Indo-China as well as of the
Indian Archipelago, and even if the words for " rice"
originally meant some other cereal, which I do not
see any particular reason to believe, they are at any
rate evidence of some, however primitive, cultivation,
which in itself negatives the view that all planting on
the part of these tribes is due to Malay influence.
The true inference, in my opinion, is that, like many of
the ruder Mon-Khmer tribes, some of the wild tribes
of the Peninsula have from time immemorial planted
rice in their jungle-clearings. But they have never
made the great advance to planting in irrigable
swamp-land : that, in South-east Asia, is the Rubicon
which a barbarous tribe must cross before it can fulfil
the conditions precedent to real civilisation, first in
' op. iit. p. 670. - Hid. p. 731.