Burma: Census of India 1901 Vol. I - Khamkoo

—
REPORT ON THE CENSUS OF BURMA.
S^
have their counterpart in more than one of the M6n-Annam languages. There
are many others, however, which find an echo in only one of these tongues.
It is
curious that more often than not the single parallel is found in the Wa language.
Instances of this phenomenon are— House—Danaw, nya; Wa, nyai or nya: Roof
—Danaw, plang; Wa, lop-plawng : to make—Danaw, yawk, Wa,jfli. Now and
then, as in the case of the word for moon ' ' (kato) there is no similar word in any
of the languages of the Wa-Palaung group, but an exact counterpart in Taking.
How the Danaw acquired their tongue is, and will be till our knowledge is much
enlarged, to a certain degree a matter of conjecture. In all 18,994 persons were
shown as ordinarily speaking Danaw at the 190 1 Census.
1 39. Appended to this chapter is a synopsis of the principal languages and
dialects of the Indo-Chinese family spoken in the proguag
n PS 'S ° a ""
es
yir.ce. It is not exhaustive. It does not for instance
include Chinese or any of the trans-frontier forms
spoken by temporary residents and foreign settlers except Siamese, Lao, Hka Muk
and Lemet, which have been introduced and shown in brackets on the strength of
the knowledge that we possess as to the precise position that is to be assigned to
them. No attempt has been made to distinguish between languages and dialects.
It is probable that before the next census the list will have been considerably amplified.
The Malay Family.
140. Of the languages of the Malay family only two, Cham (or Tiam) and
. Selon (or Selung), are vernaculars of the mainland of
s
Asia. Cham is spoken by the aborigines of Cambodia
and does not here immediately concern us. Selung is the speech of the sea gypsies
of the Mergui district, and may be looked upon as one of the indigenous tongues of
British India. It, in common with Cham, has a few points in common with the
language of the Phillipines and, though exhibiting traces of contact with Malay
and other neighbouring languages, possesses several marked original characteristics.
Its speakers numbered 1,318 on the istMarch 1901. Dr. Grierson tells us
that both Cham and Selon are probably the residuum of a tongue spoken at "an
extremely remote period by a prehistoric race on the Continent
of Further India.
It maybe of interest to note what Logan said of Selon in 1851. The following
is an extract from an article by that indefatigable scholar in the Journal of the
Indian Archipelago of that year :
" The language of the Silong of the Mergui Archipelago is mainly dissyllabic, but with,
a strong monosyllabic tendency. Its phonology, like that of the Simang, is a compound of
Earlier West Indonesian and Ultra-Indian. It possesses several non-Indonesian combinations
of consonants, such as nh, mn, pn, dn, in, km, gm, Im, pi, kb, kg, tk. Some of these,
however, are found in the more consonantal of the West Indonesian dialects, particularly in
- some Malayan and Borneon ones. Like these too, it affects long and compound vowels, ui,
at, ae, &c. Its finals are West Indonesian and with a higher proportion of consonants or
about 70 per cent, which is the same as in the most primitive and consonantal of the North
Indonesian, Micronesian and Melanesian languages."
141. Of the remaining vernaculars of India there is but little of special import-
. , .. ance to record- They will have received ample treat-
Other vernaculars of lnd,a.
^^ ^ ^ ^^ rf ^ ^^ Superintenden ts f
Census. I cannot flatter myself that the figures in Burma are likely to be of much
more value than those relating to castes- It was not to be expected that any appreciable
number of the indigenous enumerators of the province would know the
names of more than one or two of the many languages of India they might be called
upon to record, and without some such knowledge it would have been unreasonable
to reckon on anything approaching accuracy. Dr. Grierson tells us in the preface
to his " Indexes of languages " that an uneducated Native rarely knows the name of
his own dialect. I would go further and say that, when dealing with foreigners
who are unable, so to speak, to give him a lead, he would often appear to be ignorant
not only of the name of the. dialect of the language he speaks, but of that of
Ihe language itself. A substantial percentage of the Indian immigrants into Burma
are uneducated and, as at the census the enumerator in nine cases out of ten was
omable to help his man out, it is not surprising that a distressingly large number oj