02-01-065
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
65
Captain Neufville, along with nearly six thousand Assamese slaves, in 1825,
and continued their journey to the Jorhat Subdivision, where they are still
settled. During their servitude to the Kachins they entirely forgot their own
language, and now only speak that of their conquerors, Singpho. They have, however,
still a few books in their own language, which is practically the same as Kh
mt
.
The Nors profess
to look down on the Tairongs because they intermarried with the Kachins during
their captivity, but the difference between the two tribes is very slight. Tairongs
profess to intermarry with Nors,
Khmts,
and Kachins, but, although these tribes would accept Tairong girls as wives,
it is not likely that they would allow Tairongs to marry their own daughters.
The number of Tairongs counted at the Census of 1891 was 301.
The Aitons or Aitonis,
also called Shm
Doniys,
or Shn interpreters,
are said to have been the section of the Shns
at M
ng K
ng
which supplied eunuchs to the royal seraglio, and to have emigrated to Assam
to avoid the punishment to which, for some reason, they had been condemned.
There are two small settlements of this tribe, one in the Naga Hills and the
other in the Sibsagar District. They are Buddhists, and their priests come from
the Khmt
villages in Lakhimpur. The number of Aitons counted at the census of 1891 was
163, but there were probably more, who were returned simply as Shns.
From the foregoing it will appear that there were two distinct classes of
Tai immi- grants into Assam, both belonging to the Northern Shn
tribes. The first immigration was that of the 
homs, who entered Assam in
the twelfth century A. D. as conquerors, and gave their name to the country.
The second consisted of a number of small clans who came into Assam at various
times between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth
century, not as conquerors, but as refugees from the oppression of the Burmese
and the Kachins. Of these the Khmts
were the earliest and most important, and the others were small bodies of a
few hundred people each, all closely connected with them, and speaking the same
language. One of them, however, the Tairong, passed through a course of slavery
on its route, and has abandoned its own language in favour of that of its masters,
the Kachins. In the few points in which Khmt
differs from the Shn
of Burma, the other modern Tai languages of Assam partly agree with Khmt.
The language of the early Tai invaders,-the homs-has now died out, and the
homs are now completely Hinduised. The other Tai tribes of Assam have hitherto
preserved their Buddhist religion.
The languages spoken by the Tai people fall into two groups, which we may call, for convenience, the Southern group and the Northern group.
The Southern group includes all the languages of the tribes whom I have classed
above as South-Eastern Shns,
i.e., those who have settled east of the Salwin. It includes Siamese and Lao,
and also two varieties of the latter known as L
and Khn. Lao
is spoken throughout the country situated between the Salwin and Mekong Rivers,
and between the 19th parallel of north latitude and the northern boundary of
the kingdom of Siam. Siamese, which does not differ widely from Lao as a spoken
language, is co-extensive with the kingdom of Siam. L
and Khn are
spoken in Kainghung and in Kaingtung and the adjacent districts respectively.
They form a link between the Northern
Most of the
above is based on the note on page 284 of Mr. Gait's Census Report.
The above
is taken from page 285 of Mr. Gait's Report. K