180 Mr Crawfui'd on the 



Suage as a mixture between that of Tanna and the Polyne- 

 sian. I do not find one word in it in common with the Tanna, 

 except such as both have borrowed from other languages. 

 Those common to it with the Polynesian are the verb " to 

 eat,'' the word for " moon,'' and the words for " chief,'' or 

 " priest," which last it has in common with the Tanna. 



The Malay words contained in the New Caledonia are five 

 ill number, — that for " a cocoa-nut," for " the ear," for " fish," 

 for " water," and for " a yam," — all in a corrupt form, as 

 nu for nur, a cocoa-nut ; gal'ma for taliha, the ear ; and ufi or 

 nhi, a yam. 



Not one of the three Negro languages just mentioned con- 

 tains a word that is common to the Negro languages be- 

 fore enumei'ated, except such as all have derived from a third 

 source, the Malayan. 



To this meagre list of the Negrito languages, I have to add 

 the more copious ones furnished by Mr Jukes, of the lan- 

 guages of the Torres Straits islanders. The vocabularies 

 which he furnishes are six in number, and amount to from 37 

 words up to 545. The vowel sounds appear to be a, d, e, i, 

 0, u, and the diphthongs ai and an, which agrees exactly with 

 those of the Malay and Javanese. The consonants seem to 

 be h, ~c, d, ff, k, I, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w, and £, together with a 

 sound represented by Mr Jukes as dk, dz, andy. If there be 

 such sounds, it is clear that there are really three distinct 

 consonants, and that if these people had invented an alpha- 

 bet, each would have its distinct character. If this be the 

 case, there are 18 consonants, besides the aspirate, which 

 these languages have. 



In all these languages, I find but one word which is Malay, 

 and even this is confined to a single language, that of Mas- 

 seid or York Island. This is mareck, which the natives ap- 

 plied to the domestic fowl which they saw in the hen-coops 

 of the Fly, for they have none of their own. The word is, 

 no doubt, a corruption of the wide-spread Malayan mannk, 

 and probably borrowed from New Guinea, which the natives 

 of the islands of Torres Straits appear sometimes to visit. 

 There are two other words which are very doubtful. In two 

 of the languages, the cocoa-nut is called boonarri, which may 



