Page:Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, New York, 1860.djvu/230

 CHAPTEE YIIl LANGUAGE AND LITEEATUEE. The Fijian is not an isolated tongue like the old Etruscan, or the modern Chinese or Basque. It is a member of that wide-spread family of languages known as the Oceanic or Malayo-Polynesian type of hu- man speech. From Formosa and Hawaii in the North Pacific as far south as to New Zealand, and from Easter Island below the tropic of Capiicorn in longitude 109° west, across the South Pacific and Indian Oceans to Madagascar in 45° east longitude, languages are found to ob- tain, which less or more nearly resemble one aiiother in their elemen- tary sounds, their laws of syllabication, their vocabularies, and all their leading grammatical principles and processes. The language of the Malays and the Sumatrans is structurally that of the Malagasses ; and the Maori of the New Zealander is, to some extent, intelligible between three and four thousand miles away among the inhabitants of the Sand- wich Islands. The principal features of the Malayo-Polynesian tongues may be exhibited in a few words. Their alphabets exclude, for the most part, guttural and hissing sounds, and show a strong partiality for vowels, nasals, and liquids. Their syllables commonly consist either of a vowel alone, or of a single consonant followed by a vowel. The last syllable but one in a word is that upon which the accent is usually made to fall. The roots of these languages are generally dis- syllabic, and the practice of reduplicating words has great favour with them. A dual as well as a plural number is recognised. Nouns rarely undergo any change to express the ideas of gender, number, or case ; and verbs have no inflexions properly so called. As in the Hottentot tongue, the first personal and possessive pronoun, when not in the sin- gular, assumes different forms, according as the " we," " us," or " our " is to be taken in what is called an inclusive or an exclusive sensei The English expression, " Let us go," addressed by one individual to another in the presence of a third, is equivocal. It may either mean, " Let you