clearly to guard against the name of the sovereign being ever used, even by accident, in ordinary conversation, and this object is attained by tabooing even one portion of his name. "But this alteration," as Mr. Hales continues, "affects not only the words themselves, but syllables of similar sound in other words. Thus the name of one of the kings being Tu, not only was this word, which means "to stand," changed to tia, but in the word fetu, star, the last syllable, though having no connection, except in sound, with the word tu, underwent the same alteration,- star being now fetia; tui, to strike, became tiai; and tu pa pau, a corpse, tia pa pau. So ha, four, having been changed to maha, the word aha, split, has been altered to amaha, and murihá, the name of a month, to muriáha. When the word ai was changed to amu, maraai, the name of a certain wind (in Rarotongan, maranai), became maraamu." "The mode of alteration, or the manner of forming new terms, seems to be arbitrary. In many cases, the substitutes are made by changing or dropping some letter or letters of the original word, as hopoi for hapai, to carry in the arms; ene for hono, to mend; au for tau, fit; hio for tio, to look; ea for ara, path; vau for varu, eight; vea for vera, not, &c. In other cases, the word substituted is one which had before a meaning nearly related to that of the term disused, as tia, straight, upright, is used instead of tu, to stand; pae, part, division, instead of rima, five; piti, together, has replaced rua, two, &c. In some cases, the meaning or origin of the new word is unknown, and it may be a mere invention - as ofai for ohatu, stone; pape, for vai, water; pohe for mate, dead, &c. Some have been adopted from the neighboring Paumotuan, as rui, night, from ruki, dark; fene, six, from hene; avae, moon, from kawake." "It is evident that but for the rule by which the old terms are revived on the death of the person in whose name they entered, the language might, in a few centuries, have been completely changed, not, indeed, in its grammar, but in its vocabulary.” It might, no doubt, be said that the Te pi is a mere accident, a fancy peculiar to a fanciful race, but far too unimportant to claim any consideration from the philosophical student of language. I confess that at first it appeared to myself in the same light, but my attention was lately drawn to the fact that the same peculiarity, or at least something very like it, exists in the Kafir languages. "The Kafir women," as we are told by the Rev. J. W. Appleyard, in his excellent work on the Kafir language,1 "have many words peculiar to themselves. This arises from a national custom, called Ukuhlonipa, which forbids their pronouncing any word which may happen to contain a sound similar to one in the names of their nearest male relations." It is perfectly true that the words substituted are at first no more than 1 The Kafir Language, comprising a sketch of its history; which includes a general classification of South-African dialects, ethnographical and geographical; remarks upon its nature; and a grammar. By the Rev. J. W. Appleyard, Wesleyan missionary in British Kaffraria. King William's Town: Printed for the Wesleyan Missionary Society; sold by Godlonton and White, Graham's Town, Cape of Good Hope, and by John Mason, 66 Paternoster Row, London. 1850. Appleyard's remarks on Ukuhlonipa were pointed out to me by the Rev. F. W. Farrar, the author of an excellent work on the Origin of Language. family idioms-nay, that they would be confined to the gossip of women, and not enter into the conversation of men. But the influence of women on the language of each generation is much greater than that of men. We very properly call our language in Germany our mother-tongue, Unsere Muttersprache, for it is from our mothers that we learn. it, with all its peculiarities, faults, idioms, accents. Cicero, in his "Brutus" (c. 58), said: "It makes a great difference whom we hear at home every day, and with whom we speak as boys, and how our fathers, our tutors, and our mothers speak. We read the letters of Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, and it is clear from them that her sons were brought up, not in the lap, but, so to say, in the very breath and speech of their mother." And again (Rhet. iii. 12), when speaking of his mother-in-law, Crassus said, "When I hear Lælia (for women keep old fashions more readily, because, as they do not hear the conversation of many people, they will always retain what they learned at first); but when I hear her, it is as if I were listening to Plautus and Nævius." But this is not all. Dante ascribed the first attempts at using the vulgar tongue in Italy for literary compositions to the silent influence of ladies who did not understand the Latin language. Now this vulgar Italian, before it became the literary language of Italy, held very much the same position there as the so-called Prâkrit dialects in India; and these Prâkrit dialects first assumed a literary position in the Sanskrit plays where female characters, both high and low, are introduced as speaking Prâkrit, instead of the Sanskrit employed by kings, noblemen, and priests. Here, then, we have the language of women, or, if not of women exclusively, at all events of women and domestic servants, gradually entering into the literary idiom, and in later times even supplanting it altogether; for it is from the Prâkrit, and not from the literary Sanskrit, that the modern vernaculars of India branched off in course of time. Nor is the simultaneous existence of two such representatives of one and the same language as Sanskrit and Prâkrit confined to India. On the contrary, it has been remarked that several languages divide themselves from the first into two great branches; one showing a more manly, the other a more feminine character; one richer in consonants, the other richer in vowels; one more tenacious of the original grammatical terminations, the other more inclined to slur over these terminations, and to simplify grammar by the use of circumlocutions. Thus we have Greek in its two dialects, the Æolic and the Ionic, with their subdivisions, the Doric and Attic. In German we find the High and the Low German; in Celtic, the Gadhelic and Cymric, as in India the Sanskrit and Prâkrit; and it is by no means an unlikely explanation, that, as Grimm suggested in the case of High and Low German, so likewise in the other Aryan languages, the stern and strict dialects, the Sanskrit, the Eolic, the Gadhelic, represent the idiom of the fathers and brothers, used at public assemblies; while the soft and simpler dialects, the Prâkrit, the Ionic, and the Cymric, sprang originally from the domestic idiom of mothers, sisters, and servants at home. But whether the influence of the language of women be admitted on this large scale or not, certain it is, that through a thousand smaller channels their idioms everywhere find admission into the domestic conversation of the whole family, and into the public speeches of their assemblies. The greater the ascendency of the female element in society, the greater the influence of their language on the language of a family or a clan, a village or a town. The cases, however, that are mentioned of women speaking a totally different language from the men, cannot be used in confirmation of this view. Caribe women, for instance, in the Antille Islands,1 spoke a language different from that of their husbands, because the Caribes had killed the whole male population of the Arawakes and married their women; and something similar seems to have taken + place among some of the tribes of Greenland. Yet The even these isolated cases show how, among savage But to return to the Kafir language, we find in it |