66 THE SUBANU. 
type to which I have given the designation preduplication. This con- 
sists in duplicating the first syllable of a polysyllable; in the scheme 
which I have formulated for convenience in classifying duplications, the 
letters B, C, D, and so on, standing for the syllables of the word in order, 
preduplication is expressed by the formula BBc, or BBcD. ‘Thus is 
created a very pretty system whereby syntactical differences may be 
expressed in languages far anterior to the mechanism of inflection. 
While preduplication is quite frequent in Polynesian we are able to 
discover but five instances in which its occurrence in Subanu is satis- 
factorily established and one in which some uncertainty holds. The 
five undoubted instances of preduplication occur in words compounded 
by the addition of prefixes. Of these, four duplicate an open initial 
syllable of the stem, namely sogmog-sosulat, sogmog-dadao, po-gogovtan, 
a-lalaat. 
In the fifth instance we have the duplication of a closed initial sylla- 
ble, poc-agagom. ‘The doubtful instance is the word gagun; deriving this 
from the Malay géng, as seems probable, we may class this as predupli- 
cative. The chief objection, for vowel variety may here be neglected, is 
that gong appears to be a monosyllable and our studies of duplication up 
to the present have afforded us no cases in which the duplication has 
dealt with anything less than the syllable as a unit, none which seems to 
split the syllable. On the other hand, the length of the vowel in ging 
suggests a primitive goong, a dissyllable with two short vowels in time 
reduced to a monosyllable by crasis, yet retaining sufficient of the past 
life of the word to allow the resolution of the long vowel in the employ- 
ment of duplication. Likewise, our future studies upon composition 
of words by formative members applied interiorly will indicate very 
clearly that there is here no disposition to regard the syllable unit as a 
thing so fixed as to preclude its separability. 
Before we proceed to the details of composition in the Subanu words, 
we note a case where composition involves the loss of a stem vowel. 
The instances are few and curious. ‘The loss of stem vowel is unmis- 
takable in pic-nogan from inog, mog-langlaang from laang, quina-anglan 
from angol as we establish from its Visayan relative hangol. In lack of 
definite information upon the point, I include herewith guzadman from 
doma and poalat from laat; it is quite possible that adman and alat 
derive from doma and laat through inversion of the former syllables. 
While this may seem to us a brutal treatment of the syllable, we shall 
find in the comparison of the Subanu with the Visayan, in the next chap- 
ter, so many instances explicable only as inverts that we may anticipate 
that etymological mechanism in this case. The word pogugba remains; 
this composite is pog-ugba; the stem seems (the sense supporting) to be 
associable with gapog. It does no violence to the genius of the language 
to excise the final g, which is no more than a suffix establishing the noun 
character of the attributive vocable, and therefore is properly dismissed — 
