Page:Williams and Calvert, Fiji and the Fijians, New York, 1860.djvu/237

LANGUAGE AND LITEKATURE. 20^ they stand as the predicates of propositions. The English expression, " the good man," appears in Fijian, " the man good ; " the sentence, " The man is good," would be written, " Good is the man." The pos- sessive pronoun precedes the noun with which it is joined, unless such noun imply relationship, or be the name of a member of the body, or of a part of anything, in which case the pronoun is put after it. De- monstrative pronouns follow their nouns. Verbs usually have their nominatives after them. When the nominative takes the lead, it is used absolutely. Personal pronouns, however, do not come under this law ; for they always go before their verbs. Adverbs follow the words they qualify. Once more, it is interesting to find the language distinguishing be- tween the so-called genitive of subject and genitive of object in the use of its noun. The term, " the Gospel of God," is equivocal in English* I may mean either " the Gospel of which God is the author," that is to say, the " of God" may be the genitive of subject ; or it may mean^ " the Gospel which has reference to God," where the " of God " is the genitive of object. Li the latter case the Fijian uses the particle ni be- fore the governed word, to express the objective meaning. What the number of radical words in Fijian may be, it is difficult to conjecture. Its vocabulary is probably richer than that of many other Oceanic tongues. For relationships, for the smaller divisions of time, for metals, colours, etc., the language has few terms ; but this is not the case with most other classes of ideas and objects. Whatever belongs to their religion, their political constitution, their wars, their social and domestic habits, their occupations and handicrafts, their amusements^ and a multitude of particulars besides relating either to themselves or to the sphere of their personal and national life, they not only express with propriety and ease, but in many instances with a minuteness of representation and a nicety of colouring, which it is hard to reproduce in a foreign language. Thus the Fijian can express by different words the motion of a snake and that of a caterpillar, with the clapping of the hands lengthwise, crosswise, or in almost any other way ; it has three words for " a bunch," five for " a pair," six for " cocoa-nut oil," and seven for " a handle ; " for " the being close together " and for " the end " it has five terms each, for " fatigue " and " thin " seven each, with no fewer than eleven for " dirty ; " " for the verb " to thank " it has two words^ for " to pluck," four ; for " to carry, command, entice, lie, raise," it has five each ; for " to creep, return, pierce, see, squeeze," six each ; for " to care, draw, roll," seven each ; for " to make, place, push, turn," eight each ; for " to seize and split," nine each ; with fourteen for " to cut,"^