1^77.] Peninsula and the Indian ArcJii^ela^o. 229 



kind of alphabet in the Spice-Islands : the Eoman and Malay characters are 

 now used, and the people of Amboyna are nominally Protestant Christians. 

 In the other islands the inhabitants are pagans, with a sprinkling of Mu- 

 hammadans. M. Van Hoe well, jun., has this year published remarks in 

 Dutch on the five leading dialects of Amboyna, Sassariia, Hurunka, Nusa- 

 laut, Hila, Nagari-anpat, with a glossary. He remarks that these langua- 

 ges had been much neglected. Vocabularies of different degrees of fullness 

 are available in the works of Wallace, Crawfurd, Eaffles, Bickmore, Leyden, 

 De Clerq, Van Edris, and other Dutch writers. It would be a mere recapi- 

 tulation of names of uncertain value and number to set out the groups of 

 letters by which the forty-two languages, mentioned' by Wallace, are expres- 

 sed, though there is no doubt of the genuineness and accuracy of his lists. 



" Proceeding northwards we come to the Philippine Islands, a new 

 linguistic world, and the colonies of the Spaniards. The two great langua- 

 ges are the Tagal and the Bisayan, bat there are many hundred islands, and 

 we need not be surprised to hear of many dialects, among which the Pam- 

 panga, Jambal, Pangasinar, Ilocos, Cagayan, Camarines, Batanes, Chamena, 

 are the best known. The residents of the different islands are not mutually 

 intelligible ; out of a population of three millions and a half, called by the 

 Spaniards the Indios, one-third speak a variety of Bisayan and two-thirds a 

 variety of Tagal ; vocabularies of about thirty exist. The Roman Catholic 

 friars have played a great missionary and political part here, and the major- 

 ity of the population is nominally Christian. One of the islands enjoys 

 independence and Muhammadanism. Savage unsubdued tribes occupy the 

 mountainous interior of the chief island, Luzon ; some of them are Negritos, 

 of numbers unknown, and all pagans. There is one indigenous alphabet, 

 though the Spanish authors, who are not authorities in linguistic science, 

 assert the existence of many, but produce no proofs. It is written with an 

 iron stile on bambus or palm-leaves, and in Chinese fashion from top to 

 bottom. 



*' The great feature of the language of this group is polysyllabism, and 

 the blending of noun and verb into a single word, and the difiiculty of trac- 

 ing the roots of either is a cause of perplexity. The changes are most com- 

 plex ; perfect familiarity with every form that a word can assume, not only 

 by addition of particles, but interchange of letters, is necessary to enable a 

 person to detect the radix, which, according to Leyden, is more disguised 

 than in Arabic derivatives. Nouns have no accidents ; verbs have moods or 

 tenses, but have no pronominalization to indicate number and person ; the 

 inverted sentence-construction of the passive is preferred to that of the 

 active ; the plural of nouns is formed by a particular prefix instead of an 

 adjective following ; in verbs, inseparable particles are used, instead of auxi- 

 liaries, to mark time. 



