Cecil Champain Lowis

“ This classification has the result of, so to speak, cutting the Karen off from all intimate connection with the hill tribes with whom he would naturally be held to have an affinity and to leave him still somewhat of a puzzle, but till it has been proved to be fallacious it must be accepted. ”

“ So far as Chinese and its sister languages are concerned, it has by now been clearly shown that tones do not mark a very primitive but a comparatively advanced stage of linguistic development, and the fact that the Karens are in possession of a vernacular that has as many tones as either Chinese or Shan affords reasonable grounds for the presumption that they did not begin to occupy their present seats at any extraordinarily remote period of the world's history—probably not till after a good many of the other hill tribes who now inhabit Burma had entered into theirs. ”

“ For those who know both the Karens and the Shans it is hard, at first sight, to understand how it can be scientifically demonstrable that the former are more closely related to the latter than to the other hill dwellers of Burma and the Shan States. The Karen has in th^ past been looked upon as so different from his neighbours that he has tended to become more or less an engiina, but philology has now assigned him, at any rate provisionally, a place in the order of peoples. ”