Burma: Census of India 1901 Vol. I - Khamkoo

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REPORT ON THE CENSUS OF BURMA. *3
said to bear a strong resemblance to the as yet unclassified Kadu of the Upper
Chindwin and Katha districts, which is held to have a Kachin origin. If this
relationship had been fully established, the Sak language would, as suggested by
Mr. Houghton, have to be withdrawn from the Chin, and, together with Kadu,
placed in the Kachin group of languages. Sir George Scott, however, , hesitates
to give
unreserved adhesion to this theory, throws out a suggestion that the
first Kadus were captives from the Arakan side, and thinks it best for the
present to treat Kadu as a hybrid speech. So far as I can ascertain, Professor
Forchhammer, who dealt in a note of 1882 with the Sak language, comparing it with
the Kami, the Mro and the Chin, seems never to have held any other view than that
Sak was Chin in structure and, as Mr. Houghton admits himself that the Sak
vocabulary on which his theory was based is incomplete, the matter may be said •
still to rest in doubt. Kadu has been placed provisionally in the Burma group of
languages and will probably remain in that category, for whatever it originally was,
it is now Burmanized almost out of recognition. Pending further enquiry, I have
left Thet in the Kuki Chin group. Daingnet, which has hitherto been looked upon
as a Chin form, is spoken in that portion of the Akyab district which adjoins Chittagong.
Some specimens of the language which have been sent me by Mr.
Saunders, Deputy Commissioner of Akyab, show that it must be excluded from
the Indo-Chinese family altogether. It seems to be nothing more nor less than a
corrupt form of Bengali. It claimed 3,105 speakers on the 1st March 1901.
Through the whole length of the Arakan Yomas, from Northern Arakan down
to the confines of Bassein, as well as here and there to the East of the Irrawaddy,
are found hill tribes who are known as Chins. These I have in the Chapter on
caste, tribe and race designated the Southern Chins, in contradistinction to the
Northern Chins, administered from Falam, and the Central Chins of the Pakokku
and Northern Arakan Hills. Dr. Grierson calls their speech Khyang or Sho,
neither of which terms appears to me altogether suitable. The expression " Southern
Chin," though geographically unexceptionable, has, for the purposes of a
linguistic classification, the disadvantage of giving to a single form the title already
accorded to the collection of languages of which it is a member. The tongue
appears to be known locally to the missionaries who labour in this field as Saingbaung.
Perhaps, however, the best name to give to the speech of these southern
communities is Yoma Chin, and for want of a better I will make use of it here.
Mr. Houghton is our main authority concerning this Yoma Chin form. His
monograph, which Mr. Eales has embodied in his 1891 report, appeared about
the same time as his Essqy on the language of the Southern Chins and its
affinities, which comprises a grammar, a collection of sentences and vocabularies
or the dialect. Since then he has contributed to the Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society, an article illustrating the differences between the Minbu and the Sandoway
forms, that is to say, between the speech of the eastern and western slopes
respectively of the Yomas. These differences are, when all things are considered,
not very marked, and show that the dialect is, from its most northern to its most
southern limit, fajrly homogeneous. The variety spoken in Bassein and Henzada
is said to have suffered phonetically from the intercourse its speakers have had with
the dwellers in the plains, and is not as pure as the Minbu and Sandoway forms.
The Siamese-Chinese Sub-family.
125. Whatever may be said of the other languages of the Province, those of
the Siamese-Chinese sub-family are indubitably polytonic. Of them all, that which
displays the very striking characteristics of the tonal system to the most marked degree
is Chinese, with which, as an exotic, we have here very little concern. Chinese
was the language ordinarily spoken by 47,444 persons in Burma at the time of the
Census. The corresponding figure in 1891 was 31,079. Chinese has not been
included in the Provincial language scheme, but the following note on the dialects
spoken in Burma kindly furnished me by Mr. Taw Sein Ko may be of interest :
'' The Chinese immigrants in Burma speak different dialects. Those who come from
Yunnan speak Yunnanese, which is a dialectic variety of Western Mandarin whose headquarters
are at Chengtu, the capital of SsQch'wan. The Southern Mandarin is spoken in its
purest form at Nanking, while Pekingese constitutes the Northern Mandarin. * * *
Chinamen from Yunnan and Ssfich wan, whose ' dialects are intelligible to each other, are