From central India to Polynesia
C. O. Blagden’s 1909 review in the Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society evaluates Professor W. Schmidt’s 1906 monograph proposing a vast “Austroasiatic” (or “Austric”) language family stretching from the Munda languages of Central India through Mon-Khmer, Khasi, Nicobarese, and the aboriginal tongues of the Malay Peninsula to the Malayo-Polynesian family. Blagden, drawing on his own fieldwork among the aboriginal dialects of the Peninsula, endorses the core linguistic argument while mounting a pointed critique of Schmidt’s accompanying claim of racial unity among the peoples concerned.
Summary
The article traces the intellectual history of the problem: for a quarter of a century before Schmidt’s work, a number of languages in South and South-East Asia—Munda, Khasi, Mon, Khmer, Annamese, the Nicobarese dialects, and the Sakai and Semang of the Malay Peninsula—had resisted classification within the established families. Earlier attempts, beginning with Logan’s speculative dissertations, had noted resemblances among these “linguistic derelicts” but lacked the systematic evidence to establish genealogical connection. Schmidt’s contribution, building on Kuhn’s 1889 observations, was to demonstrate through comparative phonology and morphology that these languages share a common structural system of monosyllabic roots with prefixes and infixes, and to extend the family to include the Nicobarese dialects (which use suffixes as well) and the Munda languages (which make heavy use of suffixes).
Blagden’s own contribution to the discussion is twofold. First, he testifies from his compilation of aboriginal dialects in Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula to the striking analogies between Malay and Mon-Khmer vocabulary, which he had previously attributed to ancient Malayan loanwords in the Mon-Khmer languages. He now concedes that this explanation is inadequate once Khasi and Munda are brought into the comparison, since Malayan influence cannot reach those languages. Second, he subjects Schmidt’s 215-item comparative appendix to critical scrutiny, accepting some root identifications as compelling while rejecting others as “highly ingenious guesses” that rest on far-fetched semantic connections. He identifies a methodological gap: the absence of a science governing the relations between primary and secondary meanings of words across different cultural strata.
Blagden’s most sustained objection concerns Schmidt’s attempt to balance the linguistic synthesis with a claim of fundamental racial unity. Blagden warns explicitly against repeating the errors of nineteenth-century Indo-European racial theory, noting that the Austric family is spoken by peoples ranging from Negritos to Mongoloid types to Oriental Negroes, and that linguistic relationship does not imply biological kinship. He argues that the racial claim is both premature given the available data and potentially damaging to the credibility of the linguistic argument itself.
Key Findings
- Schmidt’s “Austroasiatic” family encompasses Munda (Central India), Khasi (Assam), Mon-Khmer (Mon, Khmer, Stieng, Bahnar), Palaung-Wa-Riang (Upper Burma and Shan States), Nicobarese dialects, and the Sakai-Semang dialects of the Malay Peninsula (pp. 163–166).
- The structural basis for the family is the shared system of monosyllabic roots with prefixes and infixes; the Nicobarese dialects additionally employ suffixes, a feature Schmidt uses to link them with the Munda languages (pp. 165–166).
- Blagden cites specific root identifications he finds convincing: Malay rekat = Bahnar kat, kot = Mon dakat (“to bind/knot”); Malay takut = Khmer kot = Mon takut (“to fear”); Malay telut = Khmer lut = Bahnar lot (“to bend the knee”); Malay telan = Bahnar luon = Stieng luon (“to swallow”) (p. 169).
- The prefix pa- forms causatives across Mon-Khmer, Nicobarese, and Malayo-Polynesian; the infixes -n- and -m- appear with varying functions in multiple families (p. 167).
- Blagden rejects Schmidt’s claim that jung (“foot”), selak (“leaf”), and dak (“water”) are Aryan loanwords in the Further Indian languages, noting that the word for “leaf” demonstrably occurs in Semang dialects, contradicting one of Schmidt’s supporting arguments (p. 171).
- Schmidt’s appendix contains 215 groups of words proposed as cognate across the Austric and Malayo-Polynesian families; Blagden judges a considerable proportion convincing but identifies a significant number as dubious (pp. 168–169).
Conclusion
Blagden’s definitive judgment is that Schmidt’s work is “an epoch-making and most important contribution to philological science” regardless of whether all its conclusions are accepted in their entirety. The linguistic synthesis from Central India to Polynesia represents a genuine advance over the tentative foreshadowings of earlier investigators, but the accompanying racial unification must be received with caution and should not be allowed to compromise the strength of the purely linguistic evidence.
Context
- Blagden’s authority rests on his direct fieldwork among the aboriginal peoples of the Malay Peninsula, documented in Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, which provided him with comparative vocabulary data not available to most European scholars of the period.
- The article represents an early example of the critical engagement with Schmidt’s Austric hypothesis within the Straits Settlements scholarly community, predating the later and more systematic challenges to the family’s internal coherence that would emerge in mid-twentieth-century linguistics.