I was greatly interested, even surprised, to find that although those Indians lived thousands of miles on every side from the sea, and had never seen it, yet they talked of the pobbo mae re u—the immense water; (pobbo, water; mae, great; re, the; u, an expression of magnification such as our oh).
It was also interesting to note that they had specific words for water of streams—words which we do not possess in the English language, complete as our language is—such as down-stream, and up- or against-stream—like the French en aval and en amont. The Bororo used tche begki, down-stream, and tcheo bugkii, up-stream.
The Bororo language was rudimentary in a way, yet most complete—extremely laconic, with innumerable contractions. The construction of sentences and the position of the verb were not unlike those of Latin languages.
The chief wealth of the Bororo language consisted in its nouns. Like all savage languages, it was wonderfully rich in botanical and zoological terms. The gender was formed by a suffix, the masculine differing from the feminine.
There were in the Bororo language three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter. The masculine was formed by adding the words chireu, curi, or curireu, to the noun; the feminine by the suffixes chireuda and curireuda. There were many words which were used unaltered for either gender. In the case of animals, the additional words medo, male, or aredo, female, clearly defined the sex in specific cases where the names would otherwise be ambiguous. Inanimate objects had no sex, and were therefore neuter.
Most nouns had a plural as well as a singular, but there were exceptions to this rule, such as names of certain plants and animals, the sky, the wind, etc.; not to count things which were generally taken collectively, such as flies—ruque; macaw or macaws, nabure, etc.
The plural was made by the suffixes doghe or maghe—the maghe being used principally in possessive cases, such as tori-doghe, stones; padje-maghe, our mothers. Exceptions to this rule were the words ending in bo, co, go, or mo, to which the suffix e was sufficient to form the plural; whereas in those terminating in do or no, ro, or other consonants, the o was suppressed and an e placed in its stead. Example: jomo, otter, jomoe, otters; cuno, parrot, cune, parrots; apodo, or tucan (a bird), apode, tucans, etc.
There were a number of irregular exceptions, such as aredo, wife; areme, wives; medo, man, ime, men. Perhaps the most curious of plurals was ore, sons, the singular of which was anareghedo (son).
The words ending in go generally formed the plural with an interchangeable ghe.
The pronouns were: