Seeing that some of the people have a very good idea of drawing on the ground a map of the country, I tried one day a graphic method of obtaining the relationships of a man whose name and whose wife’s name and son’s name I knew. I put sticks on the ground to represent him and his wife and son, and then in a tentative sort of way put in a stick to represent his father, whose name he mentioned, but the game did not interest him and my researches came to an end.
Even the apparently simple matter of enquiring the names of places is not so easy as one would think. When the first party went up the Mimika to Parimau they pointed to the huts and asked what the village was called; the answer given was “Tupué,” meaning I believe, the name of the family who lived in the huts pointed at. For several months we called the place Tupué, and the name appeared in various disguises in the English newspapers. When I was at Parimau in July, it occurred to me to doubt the name of Tupué, which we never heard the natives use, so I questioned a man elaborately. Pointing in the direction of Wakatimi, I said in his language: “Many houses, Wakatimi,” and he nodded assent; then pointing in the direction of another village that we had visited I said: “Many houses, Imah,” to which he agreed; then I said. “Many houses,” and pointed towards Parimau. This performance was repeated three times before he understood my intention and supplied the word “Parimau,” and then he shouted the whole story across the river to the people in the village who received it with shouts of laughter, and well they might. It was as if a foreigner, who had been living for six months in a place which he was accustomed to call Smith, enquired again one day what its name was and found that it was London.
A PAPUAN MOTHER AND CHILD.
(On the right is seen a fishing net.)
LANGUAGE OF MIMIKA
The language spoken by the people of Mimika is by no means unpleasant to listen to, and with the customary sing-song intonation it would be almost musical, if it were not for the harsh voices of the natives, both men and women. There are many agreeably soft gutterals, and there is no hissing sound in the language, as they are unable to pronounce the letter “s.” Many of their words are really very pleasing, notably some of their names, such as “Oonabë,” “Inamë,” “Tébo,” “Magena,” “Awariao,” “Idoriaota,” “Poandio,” and “Mareru,” to mention only a few; some of the names were so long that I never succeeded in writing them correctly.
The people who lived near the upper waters of the Mimika appeared to speak the same dialect as those living near the coast, with one noticeable difference. Those words containing a “k” in the language of the people at the coast lose the “k” in the mouths of the up-river natives, thus: Ké (rain) in the Wakatimi language becomes ’é at Parimau; Kie (a leech) becomes ’ie, Pokanë (an axe) becomes Po’anë.
The only rule of grammar that we learnt was the simple method of constructing the possessive case by adding the suffix ta. Thus from doro (I) you have dorota (mine); from oro (you), orota (your), and in the same way Tebota (Tebo’s); Mareruta (Mareru’s), and so on.
They were curious to know our names and liked to address us by them; Goodfellow’s and Rawling’s names baffled them completely; Marshall’s became “Martë”; they made a good attempt at mine in “Wollatona,” and Cramer’s they pronounced perfectly.
So far as I know, they never finish a word with a consonant, and when they adopted a Malay or Dutch word which ended in a consonant, they always added a vowel; for instance, tuana (master), Kapítana (Captain), maíora (Major).