South-East Asia forty five years ago, with more than a hundred languages of six distinct stocks, only a handful of which had been even passably described, offered an unparalleled opportunity to linguistic inquiry. In opening up this field Eugénie Henderson, who died aged 74 on 27 July 1989, was the acknowledged leader in this country and widely respected outside it.

The appearance of substantial dictionaries of Kuy and Bruu, both compiled by native speakers under the auspices of the Indigenous Languages of Thailand Research Project (Sriwises, 1978; Thongkum and Puengpa, 1980), allows us to observe a significant measure of agreement between the lexicons of these two Mon-Khmer languages. There is a good deal of similarity also between their phonological systems, notably in respect of the vowels.

In BSOAS, XXXVIII, 1, 1975, at p. 92 I noted the anomaly in the Achinese and Mainland reflexes of the PAN base reconstructed by Dyen as *[tT]ahan: Ach. thön, töhön ‘to endure’, Cham tha:n ‘to draw back, restrain’, Röglai that ‘to set [trap]’, which imply rather *-q-. Dyen's *-h- rested on the comparison of Malay tahan ‘to restrain, to endure strain, to set [traps]’ with Tagalog tahán ‘cessation’, Samar-Leyte Bisayan táhan ‘to detain’, Bikol táhan ‘to endure more than another’. It required the assumption that Javanese tahan ‘to restrain, endure’, which also prima facie implies *-q-, was a loan ‘perhaps from Malay’.

Achinese and the Austronesian languages spoken on the South-East Asian mainland (‘Chamic’) are known to have borrowed numerous words from Mon-Khmer and to show other effects of Mon-Khmer contact. Systematic comparison especially of their historico-phonological peculiarities makes it appear that they are closely related, irrespective of this, within Austronesian. Such a postulated relationship is at variance with the findings of lexicostatistics. It is suggested that the discrepancy results from the very high incidence of Malay loans in Achinese.

If one examines the vocabulary of almost any Mon-Khmer language, and turns to words with an initial labial semivowel—or those derived from roots with such an initial—one is immediately struck by the number of words with meanings of the order of ‘round, circular’, ‘to go round’, ‘to put round, coil, wrap round’, ‘enclosure’, ‘to turn round, return’, and the like. Thus, consulting three relatively modest lexica, we can cite from (modern) Mon in the Western branch of the family wèn, wèn wòk ‘ to be crooked, deformed’; ω⋯αη ‘compound, enclosure’; ω⋯αη ‘to shun, avoid’; ω⋯η ‘loop, bend; to be bent round, to go round’; wòt ‘to wring out’; wòa ‘whirlpool’; with tsh ‘all around’. The Eastern Mon-Khmer language Sre, spoken around Jiring (Di-linh) 100 miles north-east of Sàigòn, has wac ‘eddy’; wal bong ‘halo round sun or moon’; wang (waang) ‘pound for animals’; war ‘to coil round, wrap round’; waar ‘to bend back’; weet ‘to turn round’; wil ‘circle’; wöl ‘again; to turn’; wör ‘to stir’. In Northern Mon-Khmer, Palaung has υαη ‘compound’; υƏr ‘to stir’; υεh ‘to avoid, shun’; νeη to come back, go back’; υi? ‘to bend’; υir ‘again, to recur’; (υrƏr) ‘to avoid, shun’; υiƏt ‘to give back, return’. (The Palaung voiced fricative υ corresponds functionally in syllable-initial position to the semivowel in the other languages.)