Towards a History of Mon-Khmer: Proto-Semai Vowels
摘要
The Semai language belongs, historically, to the Senoic branch of Aslian (Benjamin 1973a, Diffioth 1975).Senoic is one of the three branches of Mon-Khmer languages spoken in Malaysia today; and Mon-Khmer is one of the two divisions of the Austroasiatic stock, the other being Munda.In terms of number of speakers, Semai, spoken by over 16,000 people, is the most important of the Aslian languages.Some Semais live in settled villages in the lowlands of Perak, but the majority are hill dwellers in the highlands of Perak and Pahang, practicing slash and burn agriculture; they also spend much time hunting, fishing and gathering wild plants, fruits and tubers.There are even some quasi-nomadic individuals and families.The linguistic situation is even more diversified; practically every river and stream has its own dialect, depending of course on what we mean by "dialect".Semais from different settlements may have difficulties in communicating, and the difference between the most distant dialects amounts to a language barrier.No dialect of Semai has ever been described linguistically except in my own work.Over a period of nine years l ) I have discussed with Semai speakers from 117 settlements, scattered in the entire Semai speaking area; some very briefly, others for many months, depending on the circumstances.No two villages are identical.Some only differ in the choice of certain words, while others differ in more systematic ways, for example in their phonological systems.It is these systematic differences which are historically significant because they disrupt communication far more than mere vocabulary differences.If we consider as one "dialect" all the speech forms among which no systematic differences exist (or have been found so far), we can regroup the 117 settlements into 42 dialect areas, quite a large number considering the total population; and this is not a complete coverage of Semai society.I have mapped and compared these 42 dialects and gained a picture of the