15
to be found, to say nothing of certain downright mistakes[1]; but upon the whole the Prince seems to have been very well served by his scribes. Considering the difficulties encountered, this trial trip of the new writing was remarkably successful.
The Epilogue is almost certainly later than the rest of the Subsequent history of this writing. inscription. It may even have been written after the death of the Prince, though it contains no reference to such an event. It evidently was inscribed by a different hand, and was cut by a different engraver. The strokes are finer, the letters are distinctly more slender, and some of them already approximate their present shape. But quite as convincing as any of those more obvious features is the evidence of dialectal variation in the speech itself. The vowel ◌ื has entirely disappeared from the writing. It is everywhere replaced by ◌ี, precisely as is still the case in the provinces of Phrae and Lăkhawn, which directly adjoin the Sŭkhothăi region on the north. For a further difference in thought and style, see p. 21.
The direct successor of the Sŭkhothăi writing was, as has Fak Kham writing. already been said, the Făk Khám letters, so called because of the peculiar elliptical curve of the vertical strokes, recalling the curve of a tamarind-pod as it hangs on the tree. Early examples of of this type from the Sŭkhothăi region, no later than sixty or seventy years after our inscription, already exhibit its principal features:—superscript and subscript vowels, entire loss of the ◌ื vowel, more slender bodies of the letters, and a gradual approach to the modern type. For a time the Khămén character seems to have been a formidable competitor, especially in the religious field. But the Făk Khám finally won its way, at least throughout all the north, as is attested by numberless inscriptions reaching down to quite modern times. It finally gave way in that region to the
- ↑ The very first line reveals uncertainity as to how an initial vowel should be rendered:—◌ีนทรา for อีนทรา. A very puzzling variation occurs ll. 51—53 and 63—66. in the spelling of a now famous word, อรัญญิก. These cases are all considered in the Notes. But the greatest uncertainty, or perhaps carelessness, is found in the use of the tonal accents, which are exchanged almost at random, or are omitted entirely. This last is equally true of the "tails" of the sibilants and of f and p: but this, of course, is a lapsus manus merely.
