IMAGES AND NAMES. 145 



Even to call a horse or a dog " Prince " or " Princess " was dis- 

 gusting to the native mind.^ Polack says that from a New 

 Zealand chief being called " Wsii/' which means " water/' a 

 ■ new name had to be given to water. A chief was called " Ma- 

 ripi," or " knife ; " and knives were called^ in consequence, by 

 another name, "nekra."^ Hale, the philologist to the U. S. 

 Exploring Expedition, gives an account of the similar Tahitian 

 practice known as te pi, by virtue of which, for instance, the 

 syllable tu was changed even in indifferent words, because there 

 was a king whose name was Tu. Thus /efzt (star) was changed 

 to fetid, tiii (to strike) became tied, and so on.^ 



Mentioning the Australian prohibition of uttering the names 

 of the dead, Mr. Eyre says : — " In cases where the name of a 

 native has been that of some bird or animal of almost daily re- 

 currence, a new name is given to the object, and adopted in the 

 language of the tribe. Thus at Moorunde, a favourite son of 

 the native Tenberry was called Torpool, or the Teal; upon 

 the child's death the appellation of tilquaitch was given to the 

 teal, and that of torpool altogether dropped among the Moo- 

 runde tribe. '''^ The change of language in Tasmania, which 

 has resulted from dropping the names of the dead, is thus de- 

 scribed by Mr. Milligan : — " The elision and absolute rejection 

 and disuse of words from time to time has been noticed as 

 a source of change in the Aboriginal dialects. It happened 

 thus : — The names of men and women were taken from na- 

 tural objects and occurrences around, as, for instance, a kan- 

 garoo, a gum-tree, snow, hail, thunder, the wind, the sea, the 

 Waratah — or Blandifordia or Boronia when in blossom, etc., 

 but it was a settled custom in every tribe, upon the death of 

 any individual, most scrupulously to abstain ever after from men- 

 tioning the name of the deceased, — a rule, the infraction of 

 which would, they considered, be followed by some dire calami- 

 ties : they therefore used great circumlocution in referring to a 

 dead person, so as to avoid pronunciation of the name, — if, for 



' Cook, Third Voyage, vol. ii. p. 170. 

 ' Polack, vol. i. p. 38 ; vol. ii. p. 126. 

 . 3 Hale, in U. S. Exp., vol. vi. p. 288. Max Miiller, ' Lectures,' 2iid series ; 

 London, 1864, pp. 34-41. ^ Ejre, vol. ii. p. 354. 



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