SIAMESE LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. Sia mese belongs to the Tai group of the Siamese-Chinese family of languages. Its connection with Chinese is distant but with other languages of the Tai group very close. It is spoken throughout central Siam, in all of southern Siam except Patani Monton, in northern Siam along the river-banks as far up as Utaradit and Raheng, and in eastern Siam as far as the Korot Monton. Sia mese was purely monosyllabic, each true word consisting of a single vowel sound preceded by, or followed by, a consonant. Of such monosyllables there are less than 2,000, and therefore many syllables have to do duty for the expression of more than one idea, confusion being avoided by the tone in which they are spoken.
The current Siamese characters are derived from the Cambodian alphabet, which owes its origin to the alphabet of the inscriptions, an offshoot of the character found on the stone monuments of southern India in the 6th and 8th centuries.
The Siamese alphabet consists of 44 consonants, in each of which the vowel sound "aw" is inherent, and of 32 vowels all marked not by individual letters, but by signs written above, be low, before, or after the conso nant in connection with which they are to be pronounced. Sev eral of the 44 consonants express each a slightly different intona tion of what is practically the same consonant, the sound of "kh," for instance, being repre sented by six different letters and the sound of "t" by eight. Other letters are present only for use in certain words imported from Pali. The vowel signs have no sound by themselves, but act upon the vowel sound "aw" inherent in the consonants, converting it into "a," "i," "o" "ee" "ow" etc. Each of the signs has a name, and some of them produce modula tions so closely resembling those made by another that at the pres ent day they are scarcely to be distinguished apart. Only vowel or diphthong sounds, or the let ters "m" "n" "n g" "k" "t" and "p" are permissible at the end of words. Hence the final letter of all words ending in any thing else is simply suppressed or is pronounced as though it were a letter naturally producing one or other of those sounds. Thus many of the words procured from foreign sources are more or less mutilated in pronunciation, though the entirely suppressed or altered letter is still retained in writing.
Siamese is written from left to right. In manuscript there is usually no space between words, but punctuation is expressed by intervals isolating phrases and sentences.
character by signs placed over the consonant affected, and the ab sence of a mark implies that the one remaining tone is to be used. The consonants are grouped into three classes, to each of which a special tone applies, and consequently the application of a tonal sign to a letter has a different effect, according to the class to which such letter belongs. Though many syllables have to do duty for the expression of more than one idea, the majority have only one or at most two meanings, but some are used with quite a number of different inflections, each of which gives the word a new mean ing. Thus, for example, the syllable khao may mean "they," "badly," "rice," "white," "old," or "news," simply according to the tone in which the word is spoken. Words are unchangeable and incapable of inflection. There is no article, and no distinction of gender, number, or case. These, when necessary, are expressed by explanatory words after the respective nouns ; only the dative and ablative are denoted by subsidiary words, which precede the nouns, the nominative being marked by its position before, the objective by its position after, the verb, and the genitive (and also the ad jective) by its place of ter the noun it qualifies. Occasionally, how ever, auxiliary nouns serve that purpose. Words like "mother," "son," "water" are often employed in forming compounds to express ideas for which the Siamese have no single words, e.g. liik can, "the son of hire," a labourer; me mu, "the mother of the hand," the thumb. The use of class words with numerals obtains also. In Siamese the personal pronouns are mostly represented by nouns expressive of the various shades of superior or lower rank according to etiquette. The verb is, like the noun, perfectly colour less—person, number, tense, and mood being indicated by auxil iary words only when they cannot be inferred from the context. Such auxiliary words are yu, "to be," "to dwell," (present) ; dai, "to have"; leao, "end" (past) ; di, "also" (future) ; the first and third follow, the second and fourth precede, the verb. Hai, "to give" (prefixed), often indicates the subjunctive. There are com pound verbs; thus, e.g., pai, "to go," is joined to a transitive verb to convert it into an intransitive or neuter; and thiik, "to touch," and tong "to be compelled," serve to form a sort of passive voice. The number of adverbs, single and compound, is very large. The prepositions mostly consist of nouns.