118 USEFUL PLANTS OP GUAM. 



Philippines. "" In the classification of the Indo-Pacific races of man, 

 by S. J. Whitmee. the natives of the ^Marianne Islands are not even 

 mentioned.* In Tregear's Maori-Polynesian Compai-ative Dictionary 

 (1891) two distinct sets of references are given to words of the Chamorro 

 language, evidently compiled from separate vocabularies, neither of 

 which have the words properly spelled. Thus, under the word for 

 stone the Chamorro word ''achu" is cited as "'Guaham, ashou; Cha- 

 mori, atju," as though these were two languages; and no mention is 

 made of the resemblance of the Chamorro "guafi" to the Polynesian 

 "afi"' (fire), "guihan'' to "ika" (fish), '"uchan" to "ua" (i"ain), 

 "chalan" to "ala" (path), though the corresponding Malayan words 

 "api." •ikan." "hujan," and "ialan" are cited. 



As a matter of fact the Chamorro language is not a Micronesian 

 dialect, nor is it closely similar to that used by the Tagals of the 

 Philippines. One need only compare the words given in the preced- 

 ing lists with Micronesian vocabularies to be convinced of this fact, 

 and to note the difl^erence between the Chamorro "guma" (house) and 

 the Tagalo ""bahai," the Chamorro "'hanom" (water) and the Tagalo 

 "tubig," the Chamorrro "'palaoan'" (woman) and the Tagalo ""babai," 

 and the dissimilarity between the corresponding verbs, prepositions, 

 adverbs, and adjectives of the two languages. 



Pure-blooded Chamorros are no longer found on the island, it is 

 true, but in every native family of Guam the Chamorro language is 

 the medium of communication,'' and though the men of the original 

 stock were nearly all killed off by the Spaniards in their efforts to 

 "reduce" them, yet many of the women were married to Spanish, 

 Mexican, and Philippine soldiers brought by the Spaniards to the 

 island to assist in the conquest, as well as to mariners of Great Britain 

 and France who settled in the island. Few foreign women have found 

 their way to Guam, and it was from their Chamorro mothers that the 

 children learned to talk. Thus the Chamorro language has survived, 

 though it has become modified by the introduction of many Spanish 

 words and idioms, just as the Hawaiian and !Maori languages have been 

 influenced by the English, and the Tahitian and ^Malagassy by the 

 French. The entire system of numeration has been replaced by the 

 Spanish. The Spanish indefinite article "un"' has been adopted, as 

 well as the prepositions "para" (for), "con" (with), and a number of 

 other words. It should be noted, however, that where Spanish nouns, 

 adjectives, and verbs have entered the language they are made to con- 

 form with the grammatical features of the Chamorro; thus the plural 



o Encyclopsedia Britannica, vol. 14. p. 200. 1882. 

 6 Idem., vol. 19, pp. 422-128, 1885. 

 <-UnderWhatu,p.617. 



^See Safford, Xatives of the Island of Guam, American Anthropologist, n. s., vol. 

 4, p. 194, 1902. 



