

TIIE WOMEN'S LANGUAGE. /9 



their position in society they are less exposed to those vicis- 

 situdes of life, changes of place and occupation, which tend 

 to corrupt the primitive purity of language among men. But 

 in the Carib nations the contrast between the dialect of the 

 two sexes is so great, that to explain it satisfactorily we must 

 refer to another cause ; and this may perhaps be found in the 

 barbarous custom, practised by those nations, of killing their 

 male prisoners, and carrying the wives of the vanquished 

 into captivity. When the Caribs made an irruption into the 

 archipelago of the "West India Islands, they arrived there as 

 a band of warriors, not as colonists accompanied by their 

 families. The language of the female sex was formed by 

 degrees, as the conquerors contracted alliances with the 

 foreign women ; it was composed of new elements, words dis- 

 tinct from the Carib words,* which in the interior of the 

 gynaeceums were transmitted from generation to generation, 

 but on which the structure, the combinations, the gramma- 

 tical forms of the language of the men exercised an influence. 

 There was then manifested in a small community the pecu- 

 liarity which we now find in the whole group of the nations 

 of the New Continent. The American languages, from 

 Hudson's Bay to the Straits of Magellan, are in general 

 characterized by a total disparity of words combined with a 

 great analogy in their structure. They are like different 

 substances invested with analogous forms. If we recollect 

 that this phenomenon extends over one-half of our planet, 

 almost from pole to pole ; il we consider the shades in the 

 grammatical forms (the genders applied to the three persons 

 of the verb, the reduplications, the frequentatives, the duals) ; 

 it appears highly astonishing to find a uniform tendency in 

 the development of intelligence and language among so con- 

 siderable a portion of the human race. 



"We have just seen that the dialect of the Carib women, 

 in the "West India Islands, contains the vestiges of a language 

 that was extinct. Some writers have imagined that this 

 extinct language might be that of the Ygneris, or primitive 



enim mulieres incorruptam antiquitatem conservant, quod multorum 

 aermonis cxpertes ea tenent semper, qua prima didicerunt.' 



* The following are examples of the difference between the language of 

 the men (m), and the women (10) ; isle, oubao (m), acaera (u?) ; man, 

 ouekelii (m), eyeri (10); but, irhen (m), atica (10). 



