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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
The Siamese is the southernmost outlier of the great family of the Chinese dialects. Its kinship with them is shown, first, by its monosyllabic vocabulary; and second, by the peculiar use it makes of tonal inflections of the voice, not as a part of its rhetorical apparatus, but as essential elements of individual words, quite as indispensable for their right enunciation and interpretation as are the consonants and vowels that make up their framework. Their kinship is further shown by a singular feature of the content and use of words in both—a quality which is often called their abstractness. To me, however, that term seems wholly inappropriate, for it apparently denies what is one of the most conspicuous features of both languages, namely, their concreteness. The fact apparently is this: In both languages the words are symbols of concepts per se, being wholly devoid of inflectional apparatus to express and define their relations with other words in the sentence. They are, therefore, free to function in any syntactical relation not incompatible with their essential meaning. The very same thing has to a notable degree become not only possible but even common in modern English, as a result of the disappearance of the inflectional and derivational apparatus that formerly prevented nouns from taking on the functions of verbs, adjectives, and adverbs, and vice versa.
page 11 note 1 The Siamese is by no means absolutely monosyllabic. In it, as in other languages, words that are frequently associated together in speech tend to combine, forming first a recurrent phrase, then a quasi-compound,. then a definite compound. The heavy stress that falls on the distinctive member presently obscures the other member, so that though it still forms a syllable, it is no longer recognizable as ever having been a separate word. Such disyllabic compounds are a common feature of the Siamese vocabulary.
page 15 note 1 Cf. Journal of the Siam Society, vol. v, pt. ix, 1909Google Scholar.
page 15 note 2 Cf. Proceedings of the American Philological Association for 1912.
page 15 note 3 As the use of Rām Khamhæng's letters spread northward toward the sources of the Menam River, there was developed a beautiful monumental script which continued in use in the northern monasteries almost down to our times. During the period of Burmese ascendency in that region the round Burmese characters came into use for secular purposes. These are now being displaced by the standard Siamese characters throughout the area under Siamese control.
page 16 note 1 Throughout this paper I shall use this character and the name Aleph to designate this unfamiliar consonant-sound, hoping thereby to dissociate it entirely from the vowel a with which in most of our minds it is continually confused.
page 19 note 1 The symbols I have used for these vowel-sounds is that of the Oxford Dictionary, except that for the last two vowels of the middle series—which have no recognized place in English—I have adopted a symbol which I find in use among English orientalists, namely a turned lower-case m. The vowel-sound it represents is that heard in the exclamation “Ugh”, expressive of mingled terror and disgust. It should be added that in Siamese the unwritten short vowel is regularly medial short o, as in French chaud. Sometimes, however, it is the atonic half-vowel a, especially in the disyllabic quasi-compounds already mentioned, particularly after initial aspirates or sibilants as in kh'nom, s'nuk, etc. Furthermore, the vowel used in pronouncing the names of all the consonant letters is ō—the long ā of fall. Its written symbol is our friend Aleph, who in Siamese lives a double life—a consonant when initial, and a vowel when medial or final. Sometimes he plays both roles in the same syllable—e.g. in 
pronounced ōn—oddly reminding us of his European metamorphosis into a.
page 22 note 1 For the indication of these tones in the text I have used the excellent scheme of Grierson, Sir George A., set forth in his article “On the Representation of Tones in Oriental Languages”: cf. JRAS., 10, 1920Google Scholar.
page 23 note 1 For the process of measuring and plotting the tones, cf. Publications in American Archwology and Ethnology, Univ. of California, vol. ii, No. 5, 10. 1916Google Scholar.
page 26 note 1 The combination am here represents the Sanskrit anusvāra, a nasalized vowel. Therefore it appears here in the vowel series. But in Siamese speech it has become a closed syllable with a final consonant m.
page 27 note 1 The writer cannot remember where or when he learned these syllabaries; but he stands ready to repeat on demand any one of the sequences under any designated consonant in any one of the eight lists.
page 29 note 1 These names indicate clearly their Indian derivation, but neither in shape nor in name do they resemble the corresponding numerals in use in Siam.
page 30 note 1 They are not applied to syllables of type c because in them the lowlevel and the falling tones are already represented syllabically; nor in type d, because the short vowel does not afford them sufficient scope.