CHAPTER XIX

Limitations of speech--Differences of dialect--Language-groups--Tribal names--Difficulties of languages--Method of transliteration--Need of a common medium--Ventral ejaculations--Construction--Pronouns as suffix or prefix--Negatives--Gesture language--Numbers and reckoning--Indefinite measure--Time--No writing, signs, nor personal marks--Tribal calls--Drum-language code--Conversational repetitions--Noisy talkers--Ventriloquists--Falsetto voice--Conversational etiquette.

In speech, as in everything else, the forest Indian is confined within the narrow limits of his immediate surroundings. Unlike the nomadic Indian of the plains, he passes his entire existence in an area little larger than an English parish. He has almost no commercial dealings with his neighbours. The only fresh blood that penetrates his tribe is brought in by the immature children taken prisoners in war. Like the landscape his imagination owns no perspective, no horizon. In the Amazonian bush an Indian may live and die without ever having gazed upon a terrestrial object at the distance of a mile. His mode of life, a community within a single house, under a single roof, makes of household words a dialect, and with the passing of a generation makes that dialect a language.

In a society where each tribe is complete in itself and at deadly enmity with all its neighbours, and where writing is unknown, language must naturally undergo very rapid, very definite change. Moreover Indians will not voluntarily speak the language of other Indians. Thus the Amazonian natives use no common tongue, and there is little in the vocabularies so far collected to explain either the origin or the relationship of the existing dialects. Tribes divided by the breadth of a narrow river speak languages that are mutually unintelligible. On the other hand, tribes distant some hundreds of miles from each other possess a language with a common root, which is fundamentally different from those in use among all the intervening peoples.

So far as I could classify them, the language-groups of this district fall under thirteen headings. By group I comprehend all tribes speaking a language with common roots, though the dialects may vary considerably. These groups, and the approximate number of Indians in each, are as follows:

Witoto 15,000 Yuri unknown Yahua} Yahua unknown Pegua} Andoke 10,000 Boro or Miranha 15,000 Muenane 2,000 Nonuya 1,000 Resigero 1,000 Okaina or Dukaiya 2,000 Karahone } Umaua } Karahone 25,000 Saha } Tukana } Yahuna } Makuna } unknown Opaina } Bara } Kuretu } Menimehe } 15,000 Akaroa }

According to Koch-Grünberg all the tribes on the Tikie speak the Tukano language, and as a result of segmentation the Airi and Tihio speak the Dessana language.

Occasionally tribes, though speaking an entirely diverse tongue, and members of a distinctly different language-group, have some comprehension of the tongue spoken by a neighbouring language-group. For instance, the Muenane can understand Witoto, but they have no knowledge of Boro, probably because they come more in contact with the former people. The Menimehe know some words of Tupi, or lingoa-geral, which is extraordinary, even though their acquaintance with it is very slight.

The tribal names in ordinary use are, as has been said, bestowed by neighbouring tribes, and are merely nicknames. It follows that the name by which a tribe becomes known to a traveller is the name in use among the tribes in the districts through which he passes, so that a visitor from the north probably knows of a tribe by a different extra-tribal name from that known to a new-comer from the south. The difficulties of identification caused by this have already been commented on in an earlier chapter, it is only necessary to refer to them here in so far as the same difficulties beset any attempt to learn the local dialects.

Of the thirteen languages tabulated above, one of the most difficult, and the most guttural, is the tongue spoken by the Resigero group of tribes. Nonuya, also guttural, is perhaps equally difficult, whilst Andoke is possibly the worst, as it is almost ventral. Okaina, though presenting many difficulties, is easier to acquire than the first-named three, and may be characterised as nasal, while Boro and Witoto are neither nasal nor ventral nor impossibly guttural. Muenane is somewhat akin to Boro, but is richer in words. Menimehe approximates more to the speech of the Uaupes River Indians, and it again is nasal.

The endeavour to reproduce the guttural expressions of the Indian in Roman letters is rendered the more complex by the uncertainty of his utterance and the aural variations of his European interpreters. The same word phonetically transcribed by an Englishman, a German, a Frenchman, and a Spaniard bears little or no resemblance to a common inspiration. Each European observer conveys to his written word the error of his national idiosyncrasy of impression and pronunciation.

The difficulty of a phonetic rendition of a foreign language into English has long been apparent, and is one shared--though in a lesser degree--by all Continental linguists. To meet this difficulty the Germans have devised a system almost Chinese in its intricacy, while the French seek to reproduce such simple sounds as that of our English “W” by combinations of diphthongs. Many of these elaborate phoneticisms have been adopted by English writers without consideration of the lingual limitations of their inventors, or of the confusion induced in the mind of the student.

To simplify transliteration, though at the sacrifice of the finer distinctions of the language, the orthographic system of the Royal Geographical Society has been used in this work,[402] and the explanation of the system given in the appendix with the Witoto and Boro vocabularies is taken from the rules laid down by that Society and adopted by the Royal Anthropological Institute.[403] This system ordains that an approximation to the sound should be aimed at only, as any system which attempted to represent the more delicate inflexions of sound and of accent would be so complicated that it would merely defeat itself.

I attempted to make a vocabulary of Andoke words, but the language is, as I have noted, so guttural, not to say ventral, that it renders all attempts impossible without some medium to work upon at the start, such as I had with Boro and Witoto. In these two cases Brown’s knowledge of the latter, and even his very slight acquaintance with the first, were of great use to me as a basis upon which to work.

As an example of the difficulty to be faced without some common medium, I have asked a native, “What is this?” and touched my head or a stick, but could find no clue to whether his answer referred to the thing touched or my action in touching it. Only a long and tedious study can overcome conundrums of this description, and when to these is added the impossibility of conveying accurately by written signs the sound as uttered, the attempt proved beyond my powers and resources.

Mention has been made by one writer of the “‘cluck’ of satisfaction--common to all the tribes of the Provincia Oriental.”[404] I consider the sound emitted by the Issa-Japura peoples as a sign of assent or pleasure is more ventral than that described by Simson. It is approximately _Hurrr!_ like a grunted sigh of satisfaction. The exclamation of surprise amongst all these peoples is very similar and may be written _Huh!_ This sound, lengthened considerably, is the Witoto affirmative _Huhhh_. _Huh!_ _huh!_ _huhh!_ as affirmatives are very freely used in conversation. The more an Indian agrees with the speaker the more ventral do his ejaculations become. The negative will not be used except in direct answer to a question, for it is contrary to Indian custom and etiquette to interrupt or contradict. The absence of the affirmative _Huh!_ is practically a contradiction, on the ground of doing nothing being itself negative. A similar idea is seen in the tobacco palaver, where the dissentient signifies his disapproval by abstaining from licking tobacco. Should an Indian, however, wish to give an affirmative answer to a negative question, he will then make use of the negative No, for to answer Yes in Indian parlance would be to confirm the negative.

This brings us to the question of construction, and it is at once apparent that in Witoto, for example, the construction of a sentence tallies more with the construction of the deaf and dumb mute’s gesture language than with anything else, that is to say it is the very antithesis of the Chinese, or of our own. It may be said of the Indian, as Tylor wrote of the deaf and dumb mute, that he “strings together … the various ideas he wishes to connect, in what appears to be the natural order in which they follow one another in his mind.”[405] For instance the Witoto say, _Benomo honne_, literally “here put it”; _benomo ekkono_, “here open it you”; _eijo rie dotoenyino_, “much fruit put in it not do you”--“do not put much fruit into it.”

It will be noted that the personal pronoun here has become the suffix of the verb. This is the general rule, as in _dinitikwe_, “I shall carry it”; _a chimitekwe_, “I am going to see”; _ona dueruetckwe_, “I want you.” But this rule is not invariable, as we find _kwe mona_, “I am unable”; _ke hanyete_, “I do not understand,” with the pronoun _kwe_ or _ke_ placed, as we should put the “I” before the verb; nor is the variation caused by the negative, as “I do not want you” is _ona dueruenetckwe_. In this instance the position of the personal pronoun _kwe_ is probably determined by the objective _ona_, which structurally must precede, otherwise the meaning of the phrase would be inverted and become “You do not want me.” A pronoun is also used as a prefix to a noun to denote possession, as _tano_, “cassava,” _ometano_, “your cassava.” Acco