Akt. XX. — The Oceanic Languages Shemitic : a 



Discovery. 



By Rev. D. Macdonald. 



[Read 16th November, 1882.] 

 (A list of abbreviations will be found at the end.) 



Under the name Oceanic I do not include the Australian 

 languages, for though there are undoubtedly Oceanic words 

 in the Australian vocabularies, the grammar seems essentially 

 different. Car dwell, in his Dravidian Grammar (" Introduc- 

 tion," p. 53) says : — The grammatical structure of the Aus- 

 tralian dialects exhibits general agreement with the languages 

 of the Scythian group. In the use of post-positions instead 

 of prepositions; in the use of two forms of the first person plural, 

 one inclusive of the party addressed, the other exclusive; in 

 the formation of inceptive, causative, and reflective verbs, by 

 the addition of certain syllables to the root ; and generally 

 in the agglutinative structure of words, and in the position 

 of words in a sentence, the dialects of Australia resemble the 

 Dravidian, as also the Turkish, the Mongolian, and other 

 Scythian languages, and in the same particulars, with one or 

 two exceptions, they differ essentially from the dialects which 

 are called Polynesian." H The Malagasi," says Latham, " is 

 essentially a Malay language. . . . Of African elements in 

 the Malagasi none have been pointed out, . . . which, as 

 a phenomenon in the distribution and dispersion of languages, 

 is the most remarkable on all the earth's surface" (Latham, 

 Comp. Phil., p. 294). Oceanic stands out quite distinct 

 from the languages of America. This was known as early as 

 the time of Captain Cook's discoveries. According to 

 Crawford (Dissertation, p. 285), in 1000 words of Javanese 

 there are 110 of Sanscrit, but 50 in the same number of 

 Malay, and none in Polynesia ; yet this Sanscrit was in 

 Javanese and Malay probably before the Christian era, and 

 introduced with Hinduism. Mohammedanism has been in- 

 troduced along with modern Arabic, of which there are 52 



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