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APPENDIX. 
lesson in the language; and notwithstanding the opinion ex¬ 
pressed by a late amiable and distinguished writer in connection 
with language, that “ the concerns of barbarians unconnected 
and remote from all contact with literature or civilisation, and 
destitute of all historic records, will scarcely be thought to 
require any great portion of attention from the philosophical 
inquirer,” I am induced to hope that a brief notice of some of 
the distinctive features of the Malagasy language, and the family 
of languages to which it belongs, may not be inappropriately 
added to the narrative of my visits. 
In the course of my first interview with the people on shore, 
I was impressed with the resemblance in colour, and often in 
form and feature, between the Malagasy and the Polynesians ; and 
asking the names of some of the common objects, I found that 
tany was the word for earth or land, which in some of the Poly¬ 
nesian dialects is aina and tana; that lanitra, pronounced lanit, 
was the name of heaven or sky, which in the Sandwich and other 
islands is called lani or langi; that mata signified, as it does in 
Polynesia, the human face; that nio , pronounced niu, the name 
for the cocoa-nut tree, was exactly the same as in the South Sea 
Islands; and that the names of the pandanus and other trees 
growing around were, with slight variations, the same as those 
used by the Tahitians and Sandwich Islanders. These and other 
coincidences greatly strengthened my previously formed opinions 
as to the close resemblance, if not identity, of these languages. 
Subsequent investigations furnished additional evidence of this 
resemblance, not only in the signification of words of the same 
sound, but in the arrangement and grammatical structure of the 
language ; while protracted intercourse with the people also made 
me acquainted with many important points in which, in both 
these respects, the languages differ from each other. 
One of the most remarkable facts in connection with the Ma¬ 
lagasy language is the vast distance to which the same language 
has been extended. That there is an intimate connection, if not 
radical identity, between the Malayan and other languages spoken 
throughout the Asiatic Archipelago and those used by the races 
inhabiting the islands spread over the eastern part of the Pacific 
