LANGUAGE OF MIMIKA 107 



were not for the harsh voices of the natives, both men 

 and women. There are many agreeably soft gutterals, 

 and there is no hissing sound in the language, as they 

 are unable to pronounce the letter " s." Many of 

 their words are really very pleasing, notably some of 

 their names, such as " Oonabe," " Iname," " Tebo," 

 " Magena," " Awariao," " Idoriaota," " Poandio," and 

 " Mareru," to mention only a few ; some of the names 

 were so long that I never succeeded in writing them 

 correctl3^ 



The people who lived near the upper waters of the 

 Mimika appeared to speak the same dialect as those 

 living near the coast, with one noticeable difference. 

 Those words containing a " k " in the language of the 

 people at the coast lose the " k " in the mouths of the 

 up-river natives, thus : Ke (rain) in the Wakatimi 

 language becomes 'e at Parimau ; Kie (a leech) becomes 

 'ie, Pokane (an axe) becomes Po 'anc. 



The only rule of grammar that we learnt was the 

 simple method of constructing the possessive case by 

 adding the suffix ta. Thus from doro (I) you have 

 dorota (mine) ; from oro (you), orota (your), and in the 

 same way Tehota (Tebo's) ; Mareruta (Mareru's), and 

 so on. 



They were curious to know our names and hked to 

 address us by them ; Goodfellow's and Rawling's names 

 baffied them completely ; Marshall's became *' Martti " ; 

 they made a good attempt at mine in " Wollatona," 

 and Cramer's they pronounced perfectly. 



So far as I know, they never finish a word with a 

 consonant, and when they adopted a Malay or Dutcli 



