CHAPTER XIX
Limitations of speech—Differences of dialect—Language-groups—Tribal names—Difficulties of languages—Method of transliteration—Need of a common medium—Ventral ejaculations—Construction—Pronouns as suffix or prefix—Negatives—Gesture language—Numbers and reckoning—Indefinite measure—Time—No writing, signs, nor personal marks—Tribal calls—Drum-language code—Conversational repetitions—Noisy talkers—Ventriloquists—Falsetto voice—Conversational etiquette.
In speech, as in everything else, the forest Indian is confined within the narrow limits of his immediate surroundings. Unlike the nomadic Indian of the plains, he passes his entire existence in an area little larger than an English parish. He has almost no commercial dealings with his neighbours. The only fresh blood that penetrates his tribe is brought in by the immature children taken prisoners in war. Like the landscape his imagination owns no perspective, no horizon. In the Amazonian bush an Indian may live and die without ever having gazed upon a terrestrial object at the distance of a mile. His mode of life, a community within a single house, under a single roof, makes of household words a dialect, and with the passing of a generation makes that dialect a language.
In a society where each tribe is complete in itself and at deadly enmity with all its neighbours, and where writing is unknown, language must naturally undergo very rapid, very definite change. Moreover Indians will not voluntarily speak the language of other Indians. Thus the Amazonian natives use no common tongue, and there is little in the vocabularies so far collected to explain either the origin or the relationship of the existing dialects. Tribes divided by the breadth of a narrow river speak languages that are mutually unintelligible. On the other hand, tribes distant some hundreds of miles from each other possess a language with a common root, which is fundamentally different from those in use among all the intervening peoples.
So far as I could classify them, the language-groups of this district fall under thirteen headings. By group I comprehend all tribes speaking a language with common roots, though the dialects may vary considerably. These groups, and the approximate number of Indians in each, are as follows:
| Witoto | 15,000 | |
| Yuri | unknown | |
| Yahua | Yahua | unknown |
| Pegua | ||
| Andoke | 10,000 | |
| Boro or Miranha | 15,000 | |
| Muenane | 2,000 | |
| Nonuya | 1,000 | |
| Resigero | 1,000 | |
| Okaina or Dukaiya | 2,000 | |
| Karahone | Karahone | 25,000 |
| Umaua | ||
| Saha | ||
| Tukana | unknown | |
| Yahuna | ||
| Makuna | ||
| Opaina | ||
| Bara | ||
| Kuretu | ||
| Menimehe | 15,000 | |
| Akaroa | ||
According to Koch-Grünberg all the tribes on the Tikie speak the Tukano language, and as a result of segmentation the Airi and Tihio speak the Dessana language.
Occasionally tribes, though speaking an entirely diverse tongue, and members of a distinctly different language-group, have some comprehension of the tongue spoken by a neighbouring language-group. For instance, the Muenane can understand Witoto, but they have no knowledge of Boro, probably because they come more in contact with the former people. The Menimehe know some words of Tupi, or lingoa-geral, which is extraordinary, even though their acquaintance with it is very slight.
The tribal names in ordinary use are, as has been said, bestowed by neighbouring tribes, and are merely nicknames. It follows that the name by which a tribe becomes known to a traveller is the name in use among the tribes in the districts through which he passes, so that a visitor from the north probably knows of a tribe by a different extra-tribal name from that known to a new-comer from the south. The difficulties of identification caused by this have already been commented on in an earlier chapter, it is only necessary to refer to them here in so far as the same difficulties beset any attempt to learn the local dialects.