202 OK THE MALAYAN AND POLYNESIAN 
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m 
and Javanese, and three times as many diphthong's, while it wants no 
fewer than eleven consonants of the Malayan series. 
The aspirate is largely used and in a manner contrary to the 
usage of the Malay and Javanese, for it must always precede, but 
never follow, a vowel—consequently never end a word or syllable. 
Every syllable and every word must end in a vowel, and when 
foreign words are introduced ending in a consonant, the consonant 
is either elided, or a vowel added. No consonant ever coalesces 
with another; or, in other terms, a vowel or diphthong is always in¬ 
terposed between two consonants. 
The paucity of consonants, and the frequency of vowels and diph¬ 
thongs, necessarily convey to a stranger a sense of monotony and fee¬ 
bleness. Thus, the word C£ to shiver with cold,” kimaehanuru , not¬ 
withstanding its length, contains but two consonants. Tiahuahu , 
“ to distribute” or c ‘ scatter about,” and puhiMM, words each of 
eight letters, have but a single consonant a-piece. These are sounds 
so utterly repugnant to the genius of Malayan pronunciation, that 
a Malay or Javanese could hardly articulate them. 
The grammar of the Polynesian language is nearly as widely apart 
from that of the Malay or Javanese as its phonetic character. The 
Polynesian has two articles, parts of speech unknown to the Malay 
arid Javanese, but bearing some analogy to those of our own lan¬ 
guage. The cases of nouns are expressed, not by inflexions, but 
prepositions, which, however, differ wholly from those which serve 
the same purpose in the Malay and Javanese languages. 
The noun has a plural, formed by the inseparable prefix net. Gen¬ 
der is designated by adjectives ; but these differ not only from those 
of the Malay and Javanese, but from those of every other language 
of the Archipelago that 1 have examined. 
One of the most remarkable differences between the Malay and 
Javanese languages on the one hand, and the Polynesian on the 
other, consists in the latter having a singular, a dual, and a plural 
number to its pronouns of the second and third persons. The only 
languages of the Archipelago that have something resembling this 
peculiarity, arc those of the Philippines 5 but here it is the pronoun 
