Page:Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, New York, 1860.djvu/233

 LANGUAGE AND LITEKATUEE. 203 Artificial gender is unknown to the language. When it is necessary to distinguish the sexes, tagane^ " male," and aletva^ " female," are put after nouns. Thus, while gone is " child," a gone tagane is " a boy," a gone alewa, " a girl." Number is not indicated by any change in the termination of a noun. Sometimes the personal pronouns correspond- ing to the English "he" and "they" are used to express the singular and the dual or plural respectively. In other cases the singular is de- noted by the numeral dua^ " one," and the particle ve% either with or without reduplication of the noun, is put before it for the purpose of giving it a plural meaning. It is a remarkable feature of the language, though not limited to Fijian, that it has certain nouns which convey the idea of a specific num- ber of things, such number being chiefly ten. Thus sole means " ten bread-fruits," sasa^ " ten mats," ram, " ten pigs," hure^ " ten clubs," while hola is " a hundred canoes," and selavo, " a thousand cocoa-nuts." All these words take numerals with them, like other nouns. Sasa, for example, with iolu, " three," before it, denotes three times ten, or thirty mats, and so of the rest. The cases of nouns, so far as the language acknowledges them, are made by prefix particles. The nominative and objective are often alike. The possessive is indicated, with several nice distinctions, by the signs ni and i, or by the use of possessive pronouns. In such compound terms as a " basket of fish," " a bottle of water," where " of" is em- ployed in the sense of " containing," the Fijian never uses a sign of possession, but always puts them as if they were written, " a basket fish," " a bottle water." Many adjectives are primitive words. Derivatives are formed partly by the reduplication of nouns and verbs, partly by prefixing to sub- stantives and other words the dissyllable vaka, which has the force of the English It/ in " lovely," or else conveys the idea of possession. Vakawere, for instance, is " garden-having," and vakaiamata is " man- like," from were, " garden," and iamata, " man ; " and such forms as vulavula, " white," dredre, " difficult," lialia, " silly," are of perpetual occurrence. Besides the derivative adjectives there are likewise com- pounds, which may be compared with such expressions as the English " sin-stained," " wind-swept," and others. The language has no special signs for representing the higher or lower degrees of the quality ex- pressed by an adjective. In the absence of such signs it either employs intensifying or depreciating particles for the purpose of comparison, or it uses the positive in such a way as to answer the same object, or, yet again, it gives the qualification it desires by adopting a particular ar- rangement of words in a sentence 14