REVIEWS. 



The First Grammar of the Language Spoken by the Bontoc Igorot with a Voca- 

 bulary and Texts, etc. By Dr. Carl Wilhelm Seidenadel. Price $5. Chicago. 

 The Open Court Publishing Company, 1909. (Date of publication: April 

 1910.) 



This grammar of a hitherto unexplored dialect spoken far up in the 

 mountain fastnesses of northern Luzon can not but have come as a sur- 

 prise to persons resident in the Philippine Islands and interested in the 

 study of the vernaculars of their peoples since it originated on the op- 

 posite side of the globe, at Chicago, in the heart of the United States 

 of America. The explanation is, perhaps, in more than one sense, 

 characteristic of the new order of things. 



The bulk of hitherto existing grammars and vocabularies on Philip- 

 pine languages is made up of more or less time-honored works written 

 by Spanish friars to whom the study of these languages was of immediate 

 practical interest. It is characteristic of these works, especially of the 

 older "Artes y Bocabularios," products of years of linguistic study and 

 practice among the natives, that they existed often for a considerable 

 time only in manuscript form, and thus were copied and passed on from 

 colleague to colleague and from one generation of missionaries to another, 

 until, after many corrections and additions, they ultimately appeared in 

 print in Manila. 



Here, now, we have the work of an American philologist. Dr. Wilhelm 

 Seidenadel, who, withoufeleaving Chicago, his place of residence, has been 

 in contact for not more than about six months (two and one-half months 

 in 1906, and three and one-half months in 1907) with two successive 

 groups of Bontok people, who, from their mountain home in far Luzon, 

 were sent to America for exhibition. Their presence excited in him 

 a great interest in the strange tongue and he set himself to study it. 



"The difficulties seemed at first unsurmountable, for none of those whom the 

 author met at first understood English sufficiently well to comprehend questions 

 or to give explanations. Thus it became necessary to force the way into their 

 idiom by their idiom, but what had appeared, in the beginning, to be almost 

 a misfortune, proved afterwards to be a blessing; the necessity of using in the 

 research almost exclusively their vernacular, through which the investigator 

 succeeded in gaining genuine and correct material, such as in many other Malayo- 

 Polynesian idioms is collected from imreliable translations of the Bible, from 

 prayerbooks, manuals for priests, reports of unphilological officials, traders, mis- 

 sionaries and similar sources. While the material was taken down during the 



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