iption it would be difficult to make a
change. Their Welsh nationality led them to use the vowel _y_ for the
obscure sound represented elsewhere in India by a short _a_ (the _u_
in the English _but_), and for the consonantal _y_ to substitute the
vowel _i : w_ is also used as a vowel, but only in diphthongs (_aw,
ew, iw, ow_); in other respects the system agrees fairly well with
the standard adopted elsewhere. Primers for the study of the language
were printed at Calcutta in 1846 and 1852, and in 1855 appeared
the excellent "Introduction to the Khasia language, comprising a
grammar, selections for reading, and a Khasi-English vocabulary," of
the Rev. W. Pryse. There now exists a somewhat extensive literature
in Khasi, both religious and secular. An exhaustive grammar, by the
Rev. H. Roberts, was published in Truebner's series of "Simplified
Grammars" in 1891, and there are dictionaries, English-Khasi (1875}
and Khasi-English (1906), besides many other aids to the study of the
language which need not be mentioned here. It is recognized by the
Calcutta University as sufficiently cultivated to be offered for the
examinations of that body. Two monthly periodicals are published in
it at Shillong, to which place the headquarters of the district were
removed from Cherrapunji in 1864, and which has been the permanent
seat of the Assam Government since the Province was separated from
Bengal in 1874.

The isolation of the Khasi race, in the midst of a great encircling
population all of whom belong to the Tibeto-Burman stock, and the
remarkable features presented by their language and institutions,
soon attracted the attention of comparative philologists and
ethnologists. An account of their researches will be found in
Dr. Grierson's _Linguistic Survey of India_, vol. ii. Here it will
be sufficient to mention the important work of Mr. J. R. Logan, who,
in a series of papers published at Singapore between 1850 and 1857 in
the _Journal of the Indian Archipelago_ (of which he was the editor),
demonstrated the relationship which exists between the Khasis and
certain peoples of Further India, the chief representatives of whom are
the Mons or Talaings of Pegu and Tenasserim, the Khmers of Cambodia,
and the majority of the inhabitants of Annam. He was even able, through
the means of vocabularies furnished to him by the late Bishop Bigandet,
to discover the nearest kinsmen of the Khasis in the Palaungs, a tribe
inhabiting one of the Shan