ABORIGINAL INHABITANTS. 113 



of his spittle, a bit of his hair, nails, refuse of his food, or othea* thing 

 intimately connected with him. a 



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 east 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. 



All of 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 "to be sick," and the noun "father" may be considered as a verb 

 u 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 Hawaiian, 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 care- 

 fully carried out to sea and emptied. 

 977305 8 



