148 MUSICALLY-SOUNDING LANGUAGE. 



Like the majority of Malayo-Polynesian tongues, Malagasy 

 is a very soft and musically - sounding language, and has 

 been called by some the " Italian of the Southern Hemi- 

 sphere." It has no harsh or guttural sounds, but abounds in 

 vowels and liquids. It is most pleasant therefore to listen 

 to a native orator, especially as in the more formal Malagasy 

 speeches the parts of every sentence are regularly balanced in 

 construction, forming a kind of rhythm very closely resem- 

 bling the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. The arrangement ot 

 the sentences in the poetical books of Scripture is, therefore, 

 quite in accordance with Malagasy usage in public speaking. 

 A large number of hymns for Christian worship have been 

 written during the last eight or ten years, and in these both 

 rhythm and rhyme have been successfully attained, so that 

 many of the classical hymns of England (such as " Eock of 

 Ages," " Hail to the Lord's Anointed," " There is a Land of 

 Pure Delight," &c.) have passed into Malagasy. 



On first making acquaintance with the Malagasy tongue, one 

 is struck by some singular deficiencies in it ; and chief of these 

 is its having no plural form, either in nouns or verbs, just as 

 if the plural of all our nouns was, as in the word " sheep," 

 the same as the singular. But in other parts of speech it is 

 much fuller than English, as in some of the pronouns, and 

 especially in the adverbs of place, where there is such a 

 series of fine gradations of distance, from the speaker's point 

 of view, together with other minute distinctions, that it is 

 doubtful whether any but a native ever acquires an absolutely 

 correct use of them. And again, in certain subjects there is 

 great fulness, so that there are a number of words to express 

 the different ways in which a bullock's horns are curved, and 

 at least a score to denote the various modes of dressing the 

 hair. 



On one point at least Malagasy is in great advance of 

 other allied tongues, viz., in the fulness of its numeral system. 

 It is a well-known fact that many peoples have no words for 

 any numbers exceeding those of the fingers of both hands, 

 and some do not even count more than the fingers of one 

 hand ; but in Malagasy we have a complete numeral system 

 up to a million. This is certainly one proof (among many 



