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414
THE ALPHABET
geographically separated by hill and dale. The river Salween, with its mountainous bank, has formed a serious barrier even to transmission of writing. This splitting up accounts, at least in part, for the difference in the written character. Even of greater importance was the influence of the various peoples with whom the Shans came in contact in their new homelands; the Khmers played a great part in moulding the Shans who settled in what is now Siam proper, while chief influence in the north of Siam was exercised by the Mons and the Burmans. The "Shan States"-there are over fifty of them-include a great number of peoples who are absolutely distinct from the Shans. The mixture of the races is bewildering, the area being regarded as a museum of hybrid languages. Notwithstanding, the difference between the various forms of speech in the Shan group is one of dialect, not of language,
The early spread of Buddhism and the reduction of the various dialects to written form unquestionably had a certain unifying and conserving influence. Indeed, an educated Shan born anywhere within the region measuring 6oo miles each way, from Assam to Tongking and from the sources of the Irrawaddy to Siam, will find himself able to carry on a conversation in Shan with any member of the different Shan tribes,
The Thai have many different scripts; of these Siamese is nowadays the chief, but it is not the earliest. The Lao writing is the earliest, and the Lao people are linguistically and racially the most pure Shan tribe.
Lao Character Lao is nowadays widely spoken in northern Siam and in the Amherst district of Burma.
According to local tradition, it was in the 1.oooth vear of the Buddha corresponding roughly to the middle of the first millennium A.D., that King Ruang, who was a Lao, introduced the Thai alphabet. The precise date is obviously legendary and it is certainly too early. According to other Lao traditions, Buddhism was introduced from Burma in the Burmese Pali form; these traditions would give us a date which is too late.
The modern Lao script and those of some other northern Thai tribes show that they have derived from the Mon character. It is known that the Lao came into contact with the Mons before they met the Burmans and before the Khmers subdued the Mons. Consequently, the Lao must have adapted the Mon character to their language before the early tenth century A.D., that is before the Khmer conquest of the valley of Menam. Indeed, a Lao palm-leaf manuscript of the thirteenth century A.D. shows that the script was then already fully developed and had been in use perhaps for four or five centuries.
The early Lao writing is known as Fak Kham, the "tamarind-pod" character.
The present Lao script is essentially the same as that of the thirteenth century, although it has been influenced by the Burmese character and its Shan offshoots, in use among the kinsmen of the Lao and their neighbours of similar speech in the British Shan States. The Lao character
