“So the boys took a basket, the fangao, to represent Lumawig, and stuck it full of chicken feathers.  Before the fangao they placed a small cup of basi.  Then squatting in front with the cup at their feet they put a small piece of pork on a stick and held it over the cup.  ’Who took my father’s head? —­ did Tukukan?’ they asked.  But the pork and the cup and the basket all remained still.  ‘Did Sakasakan?’ asked the boys all was as before.  They went over a list of towns at enmity with Bontoc, but there was no answer given them.  At last they asked, ‘Did the Moon?’ —­ but still there was no answer.  ‘Did the Sun?’ the boys asked, and suddenly the piece of pork slid from the stick into the basi.  And this was the way Lumawig had said a person should know who took his father’s head.

“The Sun, then, was the guilty person.  The two boys took some dogs and hastened to the mountains where their father was killed.  There the dogs took up the scent of the enemy, and followed it in a straight line to a very large spring where the water boiled up, as at Mayinit where the salt springs are.  The scent passed into this bubbling, tumbling water, but the dogs could not get down.  When the dogs returned to land the elder brother tried to enter, but he failed also.  Then the younger brother tried to get down; he succeeded in going beneath the water, and there he saw the head of his father, and young men in a circle were dancing around it —­ they were the children of the Sun.  The brother struck off the head of one of these young men, caught up his father’s head, and, with the two heads, escaped.  When he reached his elder brother the two hastened home to their pueblo.”

PART 10

Language

Introduction

The language of the Bontoc Igorot is sufficiently distinct from all others to be classed as a separate dialect.  However, it is originally from a parent stock which to-day survives more or less noticeably over probably a much larger part of the surface of the earth than the tongue of any other primitive people.

The language of every group of primitive people in the Philippine Archipelago, except the Negrito, is from that same old tongue.  Mr. Homer B. Hulbert[41] has recorded vocabularies of ten groups of people in Formosa; and those vocabularies show that the people belong to the same great linguistic family as the Bontoc Igorot.  Mr. Hulbert believes that the language of Korea is originally of the same stock as that of Formosa.  In concluding his article he says: 

We find therefore that out of a vocabulary of fifty words there are fifteen in which a distinct similarity [between Korean and Formosan] can be traced, and in not a few of the fifteen the similarity amounts to practical identity.

The Malay language of Malay Peninsula, Java, and Sumatra is from the same stock language.  So are many, perhaps all, the languages of Borneo, Celebes, and New Zealand.  This same primitive tongue is spread across the Pacific and shows unmistakably in Fiji, New Hebrides, Samoa, and Hawaii.  It is also found in Madagascar.