APPENDIX. 471 



their way to the dust-heap along with other waste paper. I had 

 previously copied out nine common words in the whole series uf 

 languages, and these are here given, as well as the remaining 

 thirty-one vocabularies in full. 



Having before had experience of the difficulty of satisfactorily 

 determining any words but nouns and a few of the commonest 

 adjectives, where the people are complete savages and the 

 language of communication but imperfectly known, I selected 

 about a hundred and twenty words, and have adhered to them 

 throughout as far as practicable. After the English, I give 

 the Mahiy word for comjjarison with the other languages. In 

 orthograi^hy I adopt generally the continental mode of sound- 

 ing the vowels, with a few modifications, thus : — 



English . . . . a e i or ie ei u u 



Sounded .... ah a ee i o e or eh oo 



These sounds come out most prominently at the end of a syllable ; 

 when followed by a consonant the sounds are very little different 

 from the usual jironunciation. Thus, " Api " is pronounced 

 Ajypee, while "INlinta" is pronounced Jlintah. The short li is 

 pronounced like er in English, but without any trace of the 

 guttural. Long, short, and accented syllables are marked in the 

 iisual way. The languages are grouped geographically, passing 

 from west to east ; those from the same or adjacent islands being 

 as much as possible kept together. 



I profess to be able to draw very few conclusions from these 

 vocabularies. I believe that the languages have been so much 

 modified by long intercommunication among the islands, that 

 resemblances of words are no proof of affinity of the people 

 who use those words. Many of the wide-spread similarities 

 can be traced to organic onomatopoeia. Such are the preva- 

 lence of ^ (hard), ng, ni, in words meaning "tooth;" of / 

 and m in those for " tongue ;" of »ge , ung, suo, in those for 

 " nose." Others are plainly commercial words, as " salaka " and 



