Pygmies & Papuans: The Stone Age To-day in Dutch New Guinea

by A. F. R. Wollaston

But the long stretch of the South-west coast from the MacCluer Gulf as far as the Fly River has been quite neglected by Malay-speaking traders, partly on account of the poverty of the country and partly by reason of the shallow sea and the frequent storms which make navigation difficult and dangerous, so that the Malay language was of no use to us as a means of talking with the natives. It is true that two men from the Mimika district had been taken a few years previously to Fak-fak, the Dutch Government post on the South side of the MacCluer Gulf, but though they spent two years there and attempts were made to teach them Malay, in 1910 the extent of their knowledge of the language was the two words Tida, tuan (No, master).

It is unfortunate that there is no common language along the S. coast, nor even a language with words common to all the dialects in use. We were visited on one occasion by the Dutch Assistant Resident from Fak-fak; the native interpreter who came with him, and who knew all the native dialects of the Fak-fak district, could not understand one word of the Mimika language. On another occasion some natives from Mimika were taken down by steamer to Merauke, the Government post in S.W. New Guinea, not far from the boundary of British Papua, and there they found the language of the natives quite unintelligible to them.

So we found ourselves confronted with the task of learning a language with neither grammar, dictionary nor interpreter. This may not seem to be an insuperable difficulty, nor is it perhaps where Europeans and educated people are concerned, but with Papuans it is a very different problem. The first thing to do—and very few of them would even grasp the idea—is to make them understand that you wish to learn their words. You may point at an object and look intelligent and expectant, but they are slow to take your meaning, and they soon tire of giving information. The facial expression, which amongst us conveys even to a deaf man an interrogation, means nothing to them, nor has the sideways shake of the head a negative meaning to Papuans.

In trying to learn a new language of this kind most people (I imagine) would begin, as we did, with the numerals. But our researches in this direction did not take us very far, for we made the interesting discovery that they have words for one and two only; ínakwa (one), jamaní (two). This is not to say that they cannot reckon beyond two, for they can, by using the fingers and thumbs, and beginning always with the thumb of the right hand, reckon with tolerable accuracy up to ten. For numbers above ten they use the toes, never, so far as we observed, two or three toes, but always all the toes together to indicate a large but uncertain number. Sometimes they opened and closed the fingers of both hands two or three times and uttered the word takirí, which appeared to mean “many.” They did not, as some people do, use the word which means “hand” to indicate five or a quantity of about that number.

With patience we learnt a great number of substantives, the names of animals, the parts of the body, the various possessions of the natives and so forth, and with more difficulty we learnt some of the active verbs. But when we came to abstract ideas, our researches ceased abruptly for lack of the question words, who, how, where, when, etc.; these we were never able to learn, and it is impossible to act them.

Thus we were never able to find out what they thought of various things; we could point to the moon and be told its name, but we were never able to say, “What is the moon?” We learnt the names of lightning and thunder, but we never knew who they thought produced them. We could not find out where their stone axes came from, nor how old they were, nor who made them; and a hundred other questions, which we should have liked to put, remained unanswered.

OBTAINING INFORMATION

These limitations of our knowledge of the language were particularly annoying when we tried to find out the simplest ties of relationship. It may be thought very unintelligent of us that we never learnt the word for father, in spite of many attempts to do so. If you pointed to a child and asked a man, knowing him to be the father, what the child was, he would slap himself on the chest and answer, “Dorota kamare” (my penis); then if you pointed to himself he would tell you his own name, but never any word that could possibly be construed as father. If you tried the same thing with the mother she would point to the child and say, “Dorota auwë” (my breast). The child on being questioned pointed to the father and always said his name, the mother it would call Aína (woman), but perhaps this word also means mother.

There were two men at Parimau so much alike as to be unmistakably brothers; we learnt their names and that they were Inakwa kamare (one penis), but we never found out the name of their relationship.