152 FRENCH ADDITIONS. 



was worked something like a game at draughts. Others 

 belonged' to idol- worship, and are accordingly, like the idols 

 themselves in the central provinces, a thing of the past, and 

 will soon become, to the younger people at least, as much 

 unknown as if they were foreign words. The dictionary of 

 the first missionaries will thus be to succeeding generations 

 a kind of museum, where alone they will find relics of the 

 superstitions of their fathers ; just as the people of many 

 Polynesian groups can now only find in European museums 

 the idols which their ancestors worshipped. 



But while the language loses in some directions, it is con- 

 stantly gaining in others, from its contact with Europeans, 

 chiefly of the French and English nations. For the last 200 

 years the French have had considerable influence in Mada- 

 gascar, and during the last sixty years the English have also 

 powerfully affected the language, so that now scores of words 

 derived from these two sources are naturalised in Malagasy, 

 and form an integral part of the common speech. So that if 

 through some strange catastrophe all other knowledge of the 

 Malagasy people were lost, a complete vocabulary of the pre- 

 sent day would give a large amount of information as to the 

 influence exerted upon them by the two European nations. 



The existence of a large class of words connected with the 

 arts and appliances of civilised life would be an honourable 

 testimony to what the French had done for civilisation in 

 Madagascar; for we find in Malagasy the words chaise, la 

 table, la bougie, l'armoire, and la clef, cheval, la selle, and la 

 bride, bas, pantalon, epingle, and la mode, du the\ cafe\ la biere, 

 du vin, and la cuisine, la fenetre, la cloche, la case, la sac, la 

 soie, la vente, and cachet, with many others.* 



But English influence would be no less marked in several 

 directions. In government the Malagasy have adopted our 

 words Prime Minister, Commander-in-Chief, and Secretary of 

 State ; while almost all the terms denoting grades of rank in 

 the army and words of command are English, showing that 



* Theso words arc all altered in spelling, and in many the French article is 

 also retained as an integral part of the word, as shown in the above list by the 

 article being added to many of them ; thus, la table becomes in Malagasy 

 spelling latabalra, la clef is lakitt, while epinglo is painyotra. 



