184 ]Mi' Crav»"t'ui'd on the 



An ai'gument in favour of one oi'iginal tong-ue has been 

 attempted to be deduced from the supposition that the Ma- 

 hxyan words, so widely dispersed, express, in most cases, the 

 simplest and earliest ideas of mankind. My friend, the late 

 Mr Marsden, with his usual good faith, has given a list of 

 34 such words in 72 languages, on which, with other words 

 of the same imagined class, I shall offer afew obseiwations.* 



Among the words imagined to express a simple and pri- 

 mitive class of ideas, the numerals have been much insisted 

 on. It is obvious enough, however, that the numerals, espe- 

 cially a decimal series of them, extending like the Malayan, 

 to 1000, are far from being words expressing such a class of 

 ideas. On the contrary, they must be the invention of a com- 

 paratively advanced period of civilization. Thus, among the 

 many languages of Austi^alia, the inhabitants of which are 

 far below the humblest of those of the Indian and Pacific 

 islands, there is not one that has numerals going beyond 

 " four," and even the last number is attained only by doubling 

 the number two. 



But there are some languages of the Archipelago and Pa- 

 cific Islands, and this of the brown-complexioned race, which 

 have preserved their own native numerals entire. This is 

 the case a\ ith the language of Tambora in Surabawa, with 

 the Ternati, and the Tidovi, two of the languages of the Mo- 

 luccas, and with the language of the Pelew Islands. 



In some languages, again, the native numerals have been 

 presei'ved as far as " three" or " four," and the series com- 

 pleted with the Malayan, as in the Gorongtalu of Celebes, 

 and the Mangarai of Flores. 



The same is the case in the languages of the Negroes as in 

 those of the brown-complexioned men. Some have adopted 

 and some rejected the Malayan system. The negroes of 

 Wageou, and of the coast of New Guinea, with the natives of 

 New Ireland within the Pacific, have, to a greater or less 

 extent, adopted the Malayan numerals, while tlie Samang of 

 the Malay Peninsula, the Alfours of the interior of New 



* " On the Polynesian or East Insular Languages.' Miscellaneous Works. 

 1834. 



