49
suggestion of the set phrase which follows, that children and wives are sought in order to help in cultivating the fields. The suggestion is not universally abhorrent to human nature. The invariable precedence given to ลูก 'children' in the phrase ลูก เมีย, meaning 'family', is, I imagine, wholly a matter of euphony. The more sonorous เมีย is reserved for the final place and the heavy phrase-accent. See Note 2 p. 18. The introduction of the subject, ไพร่ ฝ้า ข้า ไท 'people of the realm', after the statement is apparently complete, is quite foreign to present literary usage, but is a frequent device of racy talk, and follows well the lead given by ช่าง above.
In the literal sense of 'father' the word พ่อ occurs thirteen times in the opening section of this inscription. As honorific prefix to the hero's name, it occurs later ten times, and in all of these I render it 'Prince'. Twice only, here and in l. 24, does it occur without any limiting word, and in both I render it 'the Prince', as suiting best both syntax and sense. B, S, and P, all choose the literal 'father', perhaps as lending itself better to the idea of a "code".
25. ผิ แล is an ancient conditional conjunction equivalent to ถ้า แล or ถ้า แม้น, 'if'—the แล curiously paralleling the 'an' or 'and' of the elder English 'an if'. Besides its ordinary function as the conjunction 'and', the word แล has some idiomatic uses in this writing which it may be well to notice here. 1) In 22 and 78, with circumflex accent, it is equivalent to '-soever' after the indefinite pronoun ใด. 2) In 51 it seems the equivalent of the modern distributive particle ละ 'every', so that แล ปีshould mean ' every year ' or better 'year by year'. 3) The แล which immediately follows this last may be the idiomatic sentence-closer still frequently heard in such locutions as นั้น แล and จบ บริบูรรณ แล, though I have rendered it by 'and' in the translation.
26. All the European editors assume that ข้า must be the pronoun 'me'. But the writer nearly everywhere else uses กู in this sense, even in this immediate context, l. 29. There is no assignable reason why he should change the pro-
