Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/143

The Tidong Dialects of Borneo. By Mervyn W. H. Beech, with Preface and Notes by Dr. A. A. Fokker. Frowde, 1908. 12 mo, pp. 120.

Mr. Beech was formerly District Officer of Tawao, British North Borneo, and in his administrative capacity came in contact with the Tidongs, a people who occupy the north-east of Borneo and seldom penetrate more than thirty miles inland. The book begins with this statement: "It is a generally accepted theory that all natives of Borneo were originally of Malay extraction. The Tidongs are absolutely so." It is a pity that this excellent little book is marred by so crude a generalisation. The dolichocephalic stock in Borneo, and other islands of the Archipelago, is certainly not of Malay extraction. Possibly all the brachycephals were not either; but, even assuming that the latter are all of one stock, we can only go so far as to state that they and the true Malays (Orang Malayu) sprang from a common stock. The Tidongs are a mixture of aboriginal pagan Kayans and Muhammadan Orang Malayu, and the resultant language was what the author calls Tidong; this is now non-existent, but is replaced by two dialects Bolongan and Tarakan. One remark is very surprising, viz. "The Kayans, being a primitive race, had only a small vocabulary. As time progressed, their descendants, the Tidongs, have supplied this lack from the language of the modern Malay settlers, and through them even Arabic, Portuguese and Dutch words have crept in." Could the author have been led to make the first statement by comparing the relative number of Kayan and Malay words in his vocabulary? This is a most untrustworthy method. A "small vocabulary" is an ambiguous phrase, and most primitive peoples have a much larger vocabulary than is usually supposed. An all-too-short chapter is given on the customs and beliefs of the Tidongs, about whom practically nothing had previously been recorded. They were originally pirates, but most probably not cannibals, as the one previous record states. Mr. Beech speaks in friendly terms of the character of the people, who, unfortunately, have fallen into the clutches of Chinese shopkeepers, and consequently are