146 IMAGES AND NAMES. 



instance, William and Mary, man and wife, were both deceased, 

 and Lucy, tlie deceased sister of William, had been married to 

 Isaac, also dead, whose son Jemmy still survived, and they 

 wished to speak of Mary, they would say 'the wife of the 

 brother of Jemmy's father's wife,'' and so on. Such a practice 

 must, it is clear, have contributed materially to reduce the 

 number of their substantive appellations, and to create a neces- 

 sity for new phonetic symbols to represent old ideas, which new 

 vocables would in all probability differ on each occasion, and 

 in every separate tribe ; the only chance of fusion of words be- 

 tween tribes arising out of the capture of females for wives from 

 hostile and alien people, — a custom generally prevalent, and 

 doubtless as beneficial to the race in its effects as it was savage 

 in its mode of execution."^ 



Martin Dobrizhoffer, the Jesuit missionary, gives the follow- 

 ing account of the way in which this change was going on in 

 the language of the Abipones in his time. " The Abiponian 

 language is involved in new difficulties by a ridiculous custom 

 which the savages have of continually abolishing words common 

 to the whole nation, and substituting new ones in their stead. 

 Funeral rites are the origin of this custom. The Abipones do 

 not like that anything should remain to remind them of the 

 dead. Hence appellative words bearing any affinity with the 

 names of the deceased are pi-esently abolished. During the 

 first years that I spent amongst the Abipones, it was usual to 

 say HegmalJcam kahcmidtek ?, ' When will there be a slaugh- 

 tering of oxen ? ' On account of the death of some Abipone, 

 the word Icahamdtek was interdicted, and, in its stead, they 

 were all commanded, by the voice of a crier, to say, Hngmal- 

 kcmi negerkata ? The word niJm-enah, a tiger, was exchanged 

 for apanigehak ; peue, a crocodile, for kaeprliak, and kcuivia, 

 Spaniards, for Rikil, because these words bore some resem- 

 blance to the names of Abipones lately deceased. Hence it is 

 that our vocabularies are so full of blots, occasioned by our 

 having such frequent occasion to obliterate interdicted words, 

 and insert new ones."^ 



^ Milligau, in Papers, etc., of Eoy. Soc. of Tasmania, vol. iii. part ii. 1859, 

 p. 281. 2 Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 203. 



