ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS. 113 
of his spittle, a bit of his hair, nails, refuse of his food, or other thing 
intimately connected with him.” 
LANGUAGE, 
The language spoken by the natives of Guam is called the Chamorro. 
It belongs to the great Malayan family, which includes the languages 
spoken by the aborigines of Malaysia, portions of Cambodia, the Pacific 
Islands from Formosa and Hawaii to New Zealand and Easter Island, 
and the great island of Madagascar, situated in the Indian Ocean, on 
the coast of Africa. Some idea of the vast area over which this group 
of languages extends may be formed when it is borne in mind that 
Formosa and Hawaii are on the border of the North Temperate Zone, 
and New Zealand and Easter Island are wholly within the South Temper- 
ate Zone, and that the language extends in longitude from Madagascar 
across the great Indian and Pacific oceans to Easter Island, its eastern 
limit, the longitude of which is cast of the meridian of Salt Lake City 
in the State of Utah. 
On examining the vocabularies of the various languages included in 
this widely spread family a wonderful correspondence will be found 
in the names of many common objects, such as fire and water, earth 
and sky, fish and fowl, many parts of the body, the personal pronouns, 
and the numerals. 
In addition to these are the names of a number of useful plants and 
trees. 
Allof these languages have certain characteristic features in common, 
such as the absence of a copulative verb, two forms of the plural of 
the first personal pronoun, one including, the other excluding the 
person addressed. Thus the adjective “sick” may be regarded as a 
verb ‘Sto be sick,” and the noun ‘* father” may be considered as a yerb 
“to be a father.” each of them requiring only a simple subject. to 
declare a fact. 
The languages of the family naturally group themselves into two 
great divisions. The first, which is characterized by simple verbal 
forms and separate possessive pronouns, together with attributive 
adjectives preceding or following their nouns without an intermediate 
ligation, or ligature, to connect them, includes the languages of Poly- 
nesia proper, viz, the Hawatian, Samoan, Tongan, Rarotongan, Tahitian, 
Easter Island, and the Maori of New Zealand. The second is character- 
ized by the addition of prefixes, suffixes, and infixes to the verb, together 
with reduplication, to express the various tenses and numbers, and to 
distinguish transitive verbs with a definite object from intransitive 
verbs, so that the original root or primitive word is often difficult to 
detect at first sight. Possession is indicated by appending possessive 
@In the Hawaiian Islands the high chiefs made use of spittoons, which were carc- 
fully carried out to sea and emptied, 
9773—05——8 
