SECTION I

I. Classification.

1.  Fuyuge:—­The first specimen of any lanugage of the Fuyuge group was collected by the Rev. James Chalmers in 1879.  This was called by him Kabana, and was printed in a collection of vocabularies in 1888. [181] From a note on the original MS., the vocabulary was assumed to be the dialect of a village on Mount Victoria (called by Chalmers Mount Owen Stanley). [182] But as Sir William MacGregor pointed out, [183] there are no villages on that mountain, hence Chalmers, in assigning a locality to the vocabulary some time after its collection, must have been mistaken.  The language of Chalmers’ Kabana is nearly the same as that of a vocabulary collected by Mr. A. Giulianetti at the village of Sikube in the Upper Vetapa or Vanapa valley, north of Mount Lilley.  This was published in 1898. [184]

A few words from the village of Kambisa, in Sirima (Chirima) valley were published in the Annual Report on British New Guinea for 1905-6, [185] and I have since been favoured by the compiler, the Rev. P. J. Money, with a fuller list.  The Rev. Father Egedi published in 1907 a vocabulary of Fuyuge along with his account of the Tauata or Afoa tribe. [186] Dr. Strong collected a vocabulary from the natives of Korona, a village situated close to the head of Galley Reach.  This was collected with the help of a Motu-speaking native, and contains a few apparently Melanesian words.  Dr. Strong was spontaneously told that these had been introduced from the coast in quite recent times. (Cf.  Sec.  III.)

The words in the comparative vocabulary are taken from an extensive collection in Mafulu by the Rev. Father Egedi.  They represent the same dialect as the Grammar in Appendix I.

That Mafulu, Kambisa, and Korona, with Sikube and Kabana, represent the same language is plain.

The Kabana pronoun nahu, I, the Sikube na(nio) I, nu(ni) thou, and the Kambisa na, I, nu, thou, hu, he, agree with the Fuyuge na, na(ni), I, nu, nu(ni) thou, u, he.  The Kabana nauera, mine, is the Fuyuge naula.  The Kambisa nara-ndo, mine, nura-ndo, thine, hura-ndo his, also show a suffix ndo corresponding to Mafulu ne in naula(ne), mine, nula(ne) thine, ula(ne) his, and in the vocabulary the Kambisa suffix nda corresponds to the Korona de in the word for “chest.”  There is, however, no evidence that the Korona de is equivalent to the Mafulu ne.  The word given in Sikube for “woman,” amuri, is the Fuyuge plural amuli, “women.”

A few other likenesses appear, as e.g., Kambisa suffix ng represents Mafulu me, ne; Kambisa fa, the Fuyuge ve; Kambisa a, Korona la, Mafulu le.

The following extract shows the likeness of the vocabulary. [187]