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Karen And Man

Before describiDg the ia.ngUl:l.o"'0S belonging to the Tibeto-Chinese languages, we mustrefer briefly to two other groupS of languages the affiliation of which is doubtful, a.lld which, pending the completion of the Linguistic Survey of Burma have been provisionally put down_80S independent families. These are the Ktt.rell Family Mld the Man Family. Neither is described in the pages of tbe present Survey. The Karen Family.

Karen is a. group of dialects spoken by members of the Karen tribe sootrered overSouth Burma and the neighbouring parts of Siam.1 According to the late Professor Terrien de La.coupel'ie. they are pre-Chinese, and in that case ma.y be connected with !;he 'Man ' laI\,"1l&o<PeS to be presently described, with which I have myseli noted more than one resemblance. It is possible a.lso tb,at t hey may be distant relations of the Kiriuti lan.,<rU3ges spoken in the Himalaya.~ but here the case must be left for further investigation by the Linguistic Survey •of Burma, Where so much doubt exists. it is hardly necessary to state that the Ka.rens have been identified by some with the lost Ten Tribes, and it is not IlCtual1y impossible that they may have gathered some of their trsditions from early Jewish colonists in Northern China.. From Northern China they appear to have migrated to the neighbourhood of Ava. whence. a.bout the fifth or sixth century of our em, they came down sonthward and spread over _the hills between the Irrawaddy, the Salwin, and the MlHuim Sgaw • Tall .. gth" o.sfarasthesea.boa.ro.. I must leave to tbe Linguistic Snrvey of Burma. t he task of desClibing the various forms'of Karen. They a.re many in number. Here it must be sufficient to state that the most important forms are Karenni. or Red ,Karen, of the north, Pwo and Sgaw of the sonth. and Taungthu.

The Man Family. The -languages which have been provisionally classed \lllder the name of < Man • are mainly spoken in China. and Indo-China.. although a few speakers are found in British Bnrma. The name < Man' is Chinese and. means a < Southern Barbarian.' It is applied by the chinese to certain wild tribes inhabiting the mountainous tracts of indo chinaand that part of china bordering on it.Representative of two of these tribes,the M.iao and the Yao have turned up in the Southern Shan States and their languages have heen recorded in the Census of 1921.

These languages hardly concern india,but will no doubt be dealt with in the linguistic survey of Burma. fuller information regarding them will be found in the introduction to the comparative vocabulary forming part 2 of the volume.

1.The locality in which Korean is spoken is shown in the map facing page 50.