53
it as y, and pronounced arayyik, the scribe, unless he happened to recall the Pali, would inevitably write araiyik, and that is precisely what he did in ll. 51, 53. B understood the word, and translated it correctly, twenty years before S discovered in it the sure foundation of the now famous theory of the Aryan settlement of the peninsla of Indo-China. S and P both suppress the word entirely in their translations of this passage, where the manifest sense makes it impossible to render it 'les Aryens' or 'des Aryikas', reserving these for the more tractable passages further on. Cf. S pp. 7, 8; and P pp. 171, 175, 188, 189, and elsewhere. As for this immediate passage, it is difficult to see how any of the European editors could have imagined that what they wrote was in any sense a translation, so few and rare are the points of contact between it and the text.
53. หัว ลาน ดำ 'Black Lan Head' probably the name of some hamlet on the road between the forest-monastery and the city. On reaching the word สยง (เสียง) in this line, the stone-cutter was evidently in doubt whether it should not be spelled with the written vowel—in fact as it has come to be spelled in modern Siamese. To assure himself, with the point of his graver he very lightly scratched the word so spelled in the vacant space below the last word he had cut. The look of it, and very likely a glance at วยง and รยง just above, convinced him that the spelling was wrong, and he proceeded to cut the word correctly. In spite of all the vicissitudes of time, and in spite of the rough handling this stone has encountered, that lightest trace of a passing thought in the stone-cutter's mind six centuries ago may still be clearly read. His doubt was not illogical. Why should not a spoken vowel have its symbol in the written word? The pressure of that ever-recurring question has at last not merely legitimized the i which he was forced to leave out, but has created a symbol unknown to the Prince's scheme for the hitherto unwritten short a. It has not accomplished the same service in the entirely parallel cases of the unwritten u of สวน, and the short o of คน.
The assistance which the parallelism and balance of Siamese writing may sometimes render the student in dealing with words unknown or lost from the text, is well illustrated in ll. 53—54. Two balanced pairs of words name a quartette of festive sounds:—พาดย์–พิณ–เลื่อน–ขับ. The third word is entire-
