201 
LANGUAGE OF RACES 
ti 
coincidence, among the 'native r Christians of the Philippines, the 
Hindoo Avatar conics to be the translation of the Jehovah of the 
Jews, and the Dio of the Spaniards,* 
The nature of the Malay and Javanese words introduced into the 
V 
languages of the Philippines, points, I think, plainly enough to their 
foreign origin. Of these found in the Tagala, nearly one-half are 
substantive nouns, or names, of tilings. The pronouns amount only 
to two, the adjectives only to five, and there is but a solitary prepo¬ 
sition. In a great majority of cases the Malay and Javanese words 
are only synonymes, and the language could not only be written 
with ease without them, but'suffer little by their omission. 
I come next to the languages of the Pacific. A language, essen¬ 
tially the same, is spoken in the Sandwich, the Society, the Mar¬ 
quesas, and the Friendly Islands, the Low Islands, Easter Island, 
and New Zealand—that is, from the Tropic of Cancer to the 46° of 
south latitude. This is one of the most extraordinary phenomena 
in the history of language ; and there is certainly nothing parallel to 
it, either within the Pacific itself, or the islands of the Indian Ar¬ 
chipelago. 
To illustrate this language, I shall take the Tahitian ami New 
Zealand dialects for examples, good grammars and dictionaries of 
both having been published.+ The French have called this wide¬ 
spread language the Oceanic, and other European nations the Poly¬ 
nesian, which last, as most general, I shall adopt. 
The vowels of the Polynesian, as exemplified in the New Zealand, 
are five in number— a, e, i, o, it,the dipthongs — six ae, ai, ao t ei, 
and on ; and the consonants only eight — k, in, n, n, p, r, t, u\ ex¬ 
clusive of the aspirate. Thus it has one vowel less than the Malay 
* Baron William Humboldt, in bis great work the Kawi Sprache, seems 
to consider the Philippine languages as exhibiting the supposed great Po¬ 
lynesian language in its greatest purity, but on what ground f am not aware. 
As far as my judgment goes, the words in common are greatly-corrupted 
Malay and Javanese. 
j A Grammar of the Tahitian Dialect of the Polynesian Language. la- 
hili 182-3. A Dictionary of the New Zealand Language, and a Concise 
Grammar, by William Williams, Archdeacon of Waiapu. Pahia, 1844. 
Vocabulaire Occanien-Fran»;ais el Fran^ais-Oceanien. Par L’Abbe Bo- 
nilace Mosblech. Paris, 1843, 
