and Bugis languages have a great many words in
common, but they have many, too, radical and invariable,
which bear no resemblance ; they are intimately
connected, but are not dialects of one
tongue, and the people who speak them are mutually
unintelligible to each other. The proportion
in which the great Polynesian language
enters into those of Celebes may be judged of
from this, that in a short vocabulary of the Bugis,
about one-fourth is discovered to be of that common
tongue. It may be remarked, that words of
this class, still current in Celebes, are frequently
such as in the languages of the western portion of
the Archipelago have become obsolete, or are appropriated
to more solemn occasions than those of
common life.
Of the Sanskrit portion of the Celebesian languages,
the quantity, compared to that in the Javanese,
or even Malay, is inconsiderable. The
words will be found to be mostly religious terms, or
the names of substances, the use of which has been
introduced among the people from India. Every
language of the Archipelago will be found to have
ingrafted upon it a quantity of Sanskrit; proportioned
to the extent to which it has been itself cultivated;
or, which is nearly the same thing, to
the civilization of the people who speak it. The
people of Celebes, and their language, are less improved
than those of the western islands, generalOF
CELEBES. 65
ly ; and this accounts for the paucity of Sanskrit
in their language. Their greater distance from
the original source of that language, the continent
of India, will contribute to produce the same effect.
v ol. ir. E