CHAPTER IIT. 
SUBANU-VISAYAN FILIATION. 
Geographically, the Subanu occupy a position within the region 
of their Visayan neighbors, unneighborly foes as appears distinctly in 
Colonel Finley’s sketch of their life. In comparison of culture the 
Subanu are on a plane far lower than the Visayans; yet so large an ele- 
ment of Subanu speech is found in the Visayan that we must recognize 
that some manner of relationship exists. Of what manner this relation- 
ship is, whether the Subanu is an archetypal speech from which the 
Visayan has evolved through more active use in better culture condi- 
tions, whether the common element in Subanu has been absorbed by 
the mountain folk from their keener neighbors, or whether each draws 
its descent from a common source—these are problems which naturally 
suggest themselves and to which we shall direct attention in this chapter. 
The proportion which this common stock of Subanu-Visayan bears 
to the vocabulary of the Subanu here assembled is so large that the 
theory of absorption is scarcely tenable. Such absorption of more 
cultured speech by a lower race becomes possible only when there is 
long-continued association in conditions where it is either convenient or 
necessary for the lower race to adopt the readiest means of communi- 
cation with the superior. 
In the general field of language growth through environment we 
may readily pick examples of the limiting cases of this absorption pos- 
sibility. Where the association of higher and lower is most largely a 
matter of the adoption, voluntarily on either side, of a modus vivendt, 
and where the questions of civic domination are negligible, we find the 
jargon type of speech, the Pidgin, the lingua franca. How scanty such 
a trade speech need be and yet serve all the endsof intercommunication, 
may beestimated from the jargon of the western Pacific, culturally more 
fairly comparable with Mindanao conditions than would be the Pidgin- 
English of the China coast. I have presented the results of such study 
in a monograph on the “‘Beach-la-Mar.”’ Referred to the base of any 
one of the rude island tongues which have contributed to this speech 
magma, the Beach-la-Mar represents about one per cent of the speech 
equipment of the lower folk; relative to the superior English, it is 
infinitesimal. 
To this type we assign the Pidgin of China, for it has been volun- 
tarily assumed under the attraction of trade chances and is not at all 
to be regarded as forced upon its users by a conquering people. Here, 
too, we place the Chinook of the northwest coast of America. It may 
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