Parents seem to possess great affection for their infants, and the number of men, especially, who may be seen about the villages carrying their children, or otherwise amusing them, is remarkable.
Six distinct dialects and languages are spoken in the Archipelago—one on Kar Nicobar, another on Chaura; Teressa and Bompoka together have one; the central islands of Kamorta, Nankauri, Trinkat, and Kachal speak a fourth; while Little and Great Nicobar with their adjacent islands have a fifth. Lastly, the Shom Peṅ of the interior of Great Nicobar employ a speech that is dissimilar to the others.
WOMAN AND MAN WEARING THE "TÁ-CHÖKLA," KAR NICOBAR.
The language, which is somewhat harsh in sound, has, however, "an extraordinarily rich, phonetic system—as many as twenty-five consonantal and thirty-five vowel sounds (it possesses a peculiar double series of nasal vowels)—is polysyllabic, and untoned, like the Malayo-Polynesian, and the type seems to resemble the Oceanic more than the Continental Mongol subdivision."[153]
This is the theory of the Kar Nicobarese with regard to their origin:—
A certain man, from some unknown country, arrived at the Nicobars on a flat, with a pet female dog, and settled in Kar Nicobar. In course of time he espoused the bitch, and begot a son. When this son was grown up, he concealed his mother by covering her with a ngong, a kind of petticoat made of coco-palm leaves, and, after killing his father in the jungle, took his mother to wife. From such parents the Nicobarese believe they originated, and it is their progeny who now people the island.
The two-horned head-dress—tá-chökla—worn by all males, they consider symbolic of their mother's ears; the end of the loin-cloth that dangles behind, they call her tail; and the piece of cotton reaching to the women's knees only, they compare with the ngong petticoat, which was her first dress.
Until comparatively recently, this ngong—a thick fringe of palm leaf about 15 inches deep, inserted in a band—was in universal wear (see Koeping, Hamilton, Lancaster, and others) and, even now, it is worn sometimes by the women when working in the plantations. It is also worn at Teressa, and still more at Chaura.[154]