Japanese Journal of Southeast Asian Studies

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The aim of this paper is to describe briefly and tentatively the phonemic and grammatical structures of the Lahu Shi language, gathered, using the Burmese language, from a lady informant living in a Christian Lahu village at a Nikhom near Mae Chan, northern Thailand during the present writer's field trip in 1964.
Linguistically, Lahu Shi is clearly divergent from the other Lahu languages, Lahu Na, Lahu Ni, on the phonological, grammatical and lexical levels. As regards the segmental phonemes, the distinction between velar and postvelar stops reported by Matisoff in the Lahu Na of Chiang Mai province is not maintained in the Lahu Shi language in question.
This dialect shows a simple phonemic system, having 23 single consonants : / k kh g p ph b t th d ts tsh dz s f h z v ɣ ŋ m n ʔ l/, 8 vowels of two series : oral and laryngealized : / i e ε ɤ a u o ɔ/ (laryngealized) and/ih eh εh ɤh ah uh oh ɔh/(oral) and 5 tonemes : high level, mid level, low level, rising and falling. The gliding tonemes, rising and falling, are realized as a high rising or a high falling tone respectively in laryngealized vowels (characterized by laryngealization or glottalization), but as a low rising or a low falling tone in oral vowels.
Syllable structure is always CV or CVV with a toneme. No consonant cluster occurs at the initial position, while a syllable has no glottal stop ending.
A word may consist of one to four morphemes. Bi-morphemic words are most frequent.
Words of the action-state class can easily be distinguished from its accompaniment by a bound morpheme ve (VP). Words refer to objects are prefixed by a bound morpheme ʔah-or ʔɔh-(NP).
Tonal change occurs quite frequently : a sequence of two high tones results in that of low and high tones. The language seems to be following the similar process of changing from a syllabic-tone type to a quasi word-tone type as seen in the Akha language, although the latter has more clearly a feature of stress. (See T. Nishida, “A preliminary report on the Akha language, ” Studia Phonologica, IV 1965/66.)

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The survey, completed in 1966, reveals the hitherto unnoticed fact that benzoin, popularly known as "Sumatran Benzoin", is classified in Singapore into seven categories according to its grade. "Almond, select" and "Almond, unselect", both being of superior quality, are exported unpressed. Those of inferior quality such as "Almond, low grade", "Almond, offgrade", "Brownhalf, scraped grade", "Raw-material, black high grade", and "Raw-material, low grade" are blended by dealers and exported under a variety of names according to the concentration.
Highly graded Siamese Benzoin are shipped unblended.
A laboratory analysis of the collected specimens representing each of the above categories yields the results shown in the appended Table.

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The clay mineralogy of the surface horizon sample of 16 paddy soils from Cambodia was studied in relation to weathering features, such as pisolitic iron concretions and sand separations in the soil profile. The occurrence of these weathering features generally agreed with the geomorphological setting of soil sampling sites. Results indicated that the clay mineral composition reflects the weathering history of a soil in such a way that the relative content of kaolin minerals increases while the illite content and other 2 : 1 type clay mineral species decrease as the soil material is more highly weathered. It was also shown that recent Mekong sediments contain quite a high amount of illite, while recent lacustrine sediments around the Tonle Sap Lake are characterized by a higher content of montmorillonite and vermiculite relative to the illite content. Soil developed in acidic swamp conditions contains a fairly high amount of 2 : 1 type minerals, which consist almost exclusively of aluminium interlayered vermiculite. Montmorillonite is the dominant clay mineral species in grumusolic soil developed residually on a basalt plateau.

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