604 Appendix, 



I profess to be able to draw very few conclusions from these vocabularies. 

 I believe that the languages have been so much modified by long intercom- 

 munication among the islands, that resemblances of words are no proof of 

 affinity of the people who use those words. Many of the wide-spread simi- 

 larities can be traced to organic onomatopoeia. Such are the prevalence of 

 g (hard), ng, ni, in words meaning " tooth ;" of Z and vi in those for tongue ;" 

 of nge, ung, sno, in those for "nose." Others are plainly commercial words, 

 as " salaka" and " ringgit " (the Malay word for dollar) for silver, and "mas " 

 for gold. The Papuan group of languages appear to be distinguished by 

 harsher combinations of letters, and by monosyllabic words ending in a con- 

 sonant, which are rarely or never found in the Malay group. Some of the 

 tribes who are decidedly of Malay race, as the people of Ternate, Tidore, 

 and Batchian, speak languages which are as decidedly of a Papuan tjqie ; 

 and this, I believe, arises from their having originally immigrated to these 

 islands in small numbers, and by marrying native women acquired a 

 considerable portion of their language, which later arrivals of Malays were 

 obliged to learn and adopt if they settled in the country. As I have hardly 

 mentioned in my narrative some of the names of the tribes whose languages 

 are here given, I will now give a list of them, with such explanatory remarks 

 as I may think useful to the ethnologist, and then leave the vocabularies to 

 speak for themselves. 



