Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 2.djvu/91

 POLYNESIAN LANQUAGES. 75 The resemblance in grammatical structure is not less curious. The languages are invariably of sim- ple structure. There is not one tongue within the whole Archipelago of complex form, like the great original languages of Europe and Asia. The rela- tions of nouns are formed by prepositions ; the tenses of verbs by auxiliaries ; the passive forms by the prefixing of particles ; and the transitive by affixing them in a manner extremely analogous in all.* In idiom and genius the parallel is still more complete ; and here, indeed, we are less surprised that the character of various tribes, however dis- tinct in their origin, yet formed under similar cir- cumstances, should have stamped a character on their languages, than when we find the same cause extending to the very sounds and grammatical forms of their dialects. Of similarity of idiom one example will be conclusive. The sun is expressed in at least ten languages of the Archipelago by a compound epithet, which means " the eye of day." Yet the words are frequently dissimilar in sound, each lan- guage rendering it by its own vocables. In all the more improved tongues we discover, throug]iout,the same redundancy of expression on familiar subjects, and the same poverty on higher and more abstract ones. For the former, the Javanese has often ten synonyms, and the Bugis six or seven, the Malay two nouns is invariably the governing one.
 * The adjective always follows the noun; anti the first of