ABSTRACT
Serious documentation of Cham began to appear in the 1880's (Landes, 1886; Aymonier, 1889), and it was not long afterwards that G. K. Niemann, in examining its Indonesian affinities, drew attention to special points of resemblance between it and Achinese (Niemann, 1891).1 His observation was founded on agreements in general lexicon and in such ' grammatical' words as pronouns. But the opening remained unexploited for more than 50 years until H. K. J. Cowan, in an article primarily directed to assessing the Mon-Khmer elements in Achinese, sought to chart the resemblances to Cham more specifically, in phonology, morphology, and syntax as well as lexicon (Cowan, 1948, 432-41). He showed correspondences in the loss of vowels in unstressed syllables, or dropping of such syllables, in diphthongization in stressed syllables, and in the occurrence of medial glottal stop, among other phonological features. In morphology, he noted Cham counterparts to the Achinese prefixes po-(causative), too, mo-(reflexive/reciprocal), and the infixes -om-(detransitivizing), -an-(forming nouns of action), along with the absence of suffixation in either language. In syntax he compared the pronominal prefixes of the Achinese verb with the Cham use of a pronoun to resume a complex subject. Dr. Cowan's final conclusions in that article (1948, 489-90), stated with 'the greatest reserve ',2 were that the complex of traits shared by Achinese and Mon-Khmer brought to mind an etat de langue closer than that of the Malayo-Polynesian languages to one ' jointly MK and MP " antedating the migrations from the mainland of which the Achinese must have come with the last wave; that in any case Achinese could not be assigned to any recognized sub-group of MP, certainly not to Western Indonesian; and that it should be provisionally grouped with the mainland languages and probably Selung, the whole unity having a special relationship (betrekking) with MK.
