Burma: Census of India 1901 Vol. I - Khamkoo

.
&
REPORT ON THE CENSUS OF BURMA.
that of Burmese and the Tibeto-Burman languages generally, there is strong presumptive
proof of relationship. The place of the object of the verb and of the possessive in Shan are
identical with the Chinese instead of being inverted in Burmese. Moreover, the use of complete
words of related meanings used together is characteristic both of the Chinese and the
Tai languages. * * * When all these points of similarity are taken into account,
the conclusion that Chinese and Tai are sister languages is irresistible."
132. The Karen tongue, in its various forms, is spoken more or less along the
"~
, „
whole eastern frontier of Lower Burma from Mergui to
aren anguages.
Toungoo, in portions of the delta of the Irrawaddy, in
the south-west corner of the Shan States and in the feudatory States of Karenni.
The total of the Karen-speaking population on the 1st March 1901 was 711,408.
The Karens are divided into three main tribes, the Sgau, the Pwo and the
Bghai, and the three principal dialects of the language follow this division.
Roughly
speaking the Sgau and Pwo dialects are confined to Lower Burma, while the
Bghai is the speech of the northernmost tribes whose habitat is Karenni and the
Southern Shan States. For convenience of classification I have called the Pwo
„ and the Sgau the Southern Karen and the Bghai the
, ,
i
Southern Karen sub-group. ivt , i
JNorthern.
Tm ^ i t
1 he nomenclature has not
i_ t n
been lormally
recognized, but it indicates a geographical fact. Sgau and Pwo are both spoken
in the narrow strip that runs up from the 12th to the 19th degree of latitude: the
communities that have spread out over the delta west as far as Bassein are for the
most part Pwos. The fundamental distinction between the three lies in the fact
that, while the Pwo form has retained its final consonants, the Sgau and he Bghai
have discarded theirs. Sgau is probably the Karen language of the future. Pwo
is said to lack vitality and to be iri danger of disintegration. Karen has been reduced
to writing by the missionaries, who have adopted a modification of the Burmese
alphabet to express it. Their graphic system includes the indication of
tones, in which the language is rich, by means of tonal signs. Dr. Cushing describes
Sgau as having "one of the most perfect systems of phonetic representation
in the world." Dr. Grierson classes Karen in the Siamese-Chinese sub-family,
and has found a place for various sub-dialects of Sgau and Pwo, such as Mopgha,
Wewa, and others in his " Indexes of Languages." Mr. Eales is generally of
opinion that Karen has suffered in the past from overclassification and is disposed
to neglect all of these varieties save Taungthu, which is spoken on the western
borderland of the Karen country, from Thaton in the Tenasserim division to the
Myelat. Judging, however, from the example given in the British Burma
Gazetteer, Mopgha appears to possess an identity of its own, and I should be inclined
to treat it as a distinct sub-dialect of Pwo. Taungthu has been regarded
as a sub-dialect of Pwo, and what Karen there is in it is Pwo, but such is the admixture
of other linguistic elements in its composition that Sir George Scott
prefers to look upon it as a half-bred language. I have, however, placed it provisionally
in the Karen group. It was spoken by 160,436 persons in 190 1. I may
here observe that of the 41,115 persons shown in 1891 as returning Taungthu as
their mother-tongue, the 5,269 who came from the Pakokku district ought to have
been shown as speaking Taungtha, not Taungthu.
1 33. The principal representative of the Bghai dialect is the speech of the Red
Northern Karen Karens
sub-group.
of Karenni and their immediate neighbours in
Karenni and the Southern Shan States. We are indebted
to Mr. Houghton for an instructive monograph on this variety. According
to him the Karenni tongue conserves the Karen language in its original and purest
form to a greater extent than the " more decrepit " Sgau and Pwo. It is believed
to have the same five tones that Sgau possesses. It has numeral auxiliaries
though its numbers from fifty onwards are, Mr. Houghton thinks, a comparatively
recent introduction. It presumably bears much the same relation to the Pwo and
the Sgau that Arakanese bears to 'Burmese. Major R. J.
R. Brown has recently
brought out an elementary hand-book of Red Karen. The total of persons using the
Red Karen dialect outside the estimated areas of Karenni was 1,363. Varieties of
the Northern Karen sub-group are spoken in the Bre country, in the Padauno- area
and in the States of Loi-long and Mongpai. Of these varieties a number oApecimens
figure in the Upper Burma Gazetteer. One of them, Mano, is a dialect of the
Bres or Laku- There are besides four representatives of the speech of the head-