Page:Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks.djvu/482

424 least idea. What I call the Javan is the language spoken at Samarang, a day's journey from the seat of the Emperor of Java. I have been told that there are several other languages upon the island, but I had no opportunity of collecting words of any of these, as I met with no one who could speak them.

The Prince's Islanders call their language Catta Gunung, that is, the mountain language, and say that it is spoken upon the mountains of Java, from whence their tribe originally came, first to New Bay, only a few leagues off, and from thence to Prince's Island, driven there by the quantity of tigers.

The Malay, Javan, and Prince's Island languages all have words in them, either exactly like, or else plainly deriving their origin from the same source with others in the language of the South Sea Islands. This is particularly visible in their numbers, from whence one would at first be inclined to suppose that their learning, at least, had been derived originally from one and the same source. But how that strange problem of the numbers of the black inhabitants of Madagascar being vastly similar to those of Otahite could have come to pass, surpasses, I confess, my skill to conjecture. The numbers that I give below in the comparative table I had from a negro slave, born at Madagascar, who was at Batavia with an English ship, from whence he was sent for merely to satisfy my curiosity in the language.

That there are much fewer words in the Prince's Island language similar to South Sea words, is owing in great measure to my not having taken a sufficient quantity of words upon the spot to compare with them.

The Madagascar language has also some words similar to Malay words, ouron, the nose, in Malay, erung; lala, the tongue, lida; tang, the hand, tangan; taan, the ground, tanna.

From this similitude of language between the inhabitants of the Eastern Indies and the islands in the South Sea, I should have ventured to conjecture much did not Madagascar interfere: and how any communication can ever have been