THE MALAGASY LANGUAGE. 
499 
ngn ; and another, which may be here added, namely, that o, 
which among the Hovas is long, and sounded as oo in hoop , is 
usually short and hard, as o in hot , among those we have placed 
under the maritime division. 
The Malagasy language contains much philosophical precision, 
and is capable of great force and beauty of expression. Its struc¬ 
ture is simple and easy, yet admits considerable variety, combined 
with elegance in the character of its sentences. Although defi¬ 
cient in abstract terms, it possesses such an admirable flexibility, 
founded on fixed principles and laws of analogy, that little diffi¬ 
culty can be experienced in communicating any new ideas to the 
minds of the natives. In some cases, there appears to be a re¬ 
dundancy of expressions; objects with which the natives are daily 
familiar admit various appellations, containing, however, but slight 
shades of variety in their signification; and hence distinctions are 
drawn out in the descriptive name of objects, that to a foreigner 
appear of too little value or importance to merit such careful dis¬ 
tinctions : e. g. the horns of a bullock have probably twenty dif¬ 
ferent names to describe their mode of growth—whether inclining 
inward or outward, up or down, straight or crooked, &c. And 
so also the plaiting of the hair of the natives admits of probably 
about thirty different names, descriptive of the kind, and size, 
and mode, and union, &c. of the plaits made. This redundancy 
of expression in unimportant circumstances does not, however, 
appear peculiar to the Malagasy language, but seems common 
to all the Eastern languages. 
The Malagasy language admits a vast variety of combina¬ 
tions of words, so as to form compound words , giving much 
terseness and energy to the modes of expression employed. 
Many of these contain allusions to the peculiar customs and 
manners of the people, without a familiar acquaintance with 
which it is extremely difficult to recognize the precise ideas con¬ 
veyed by these compound words. 
The want of a substantive verb, corresponding with the esse 
of the Latins, and to be employed in the same manner, is com¬ 
pensated in many cases by a mode of structure which prevails 
extensively in the Malagasy language, and which constitutes 
one of its marked peculiarities ; namely, that of making adverbs 
and prepositions susceptible of tense, or time, by distinguishing 
the past from the present. 
The copiousness of the language consists not merely in its 
stock of words, but in its facility of forming numerous deriva¬ 
tives, agreeably to fixed rules, from one simple root, which 
derivatives convey all the shades of variety of meaning, which 
in many other languages would be expressed by some adjuncst, 
adverbs, or even a periphrasis : e. g. mody , is, “to go home,”— 
tampody , “to go out, and return home the same day.” 
2 k 2 
