39
words:—โขง 42, ของ 100; โอก 48, 83, ออก 100 115; โนน 50, นอน 71, 74, 117, 121.
2—3. เผือ which occurs twice in this sentence, is the well-known sentimental 1st personal pronoun of the romances. S copies it rightly, but is quite at a loss what to do with it. In face of the explicit language of the text that "my elder brother who was first died from me while yet little," S renders: "Le frère qui suivit l'ainé (le cadet) mourut." P's text is right, and his understanding of the general drift of the passage; but troubled still by the memory of เผือ, he gratuitously adds: "le frère cadet m'est resté." The second เผือ S gets r1d of by transliterating it as เมื่อ, which gives an impossible syntax. In the second word beyond this S was puzzled by the unfamiliar แฏ่ (แต่), and writes the word แล in his text, and sẽ in his transliteration,—with no intelligible meaning in either case. RS gives a modern gloss ตั้ง แต่ for ตยม แต่, which no doubt gives the true meaning. But ตยม seems wholly obsolete.
The reader will notice that division of words at the end of a line caused the early scribe no difficulty whatever. The line simply ended with the last letter that could conveniently be included.
4. The word เข้า (rice) is here used as a measure of time equivalent to 'year'. It occurs again in the same sense in 82, 104, 105. The other word for year—ปี—is used also in this text, but only in connection with the name of the cyclic year of date:—80, 101, 106.
The words ขุน สาม ชน mean 'lord (prince) of three peoples'; and I understand them to be the chieftain's feudal title as overlord of three clans, while เจ้า เมือง ตาก names his civic authority and his stronghold. Both French versions, however, read "mandarin (or seigneur) de troisième rang", plainly understanding ช้นน instead of ชน of their own text. They thus imply an imperial organization of government wholly unknown in feudal Siam. Tak is now a ruined town a short distance above the modern Răhæng, and about forty miles
