valign="top" class="xd20e171">Tagacaolo

This bibliography, which we rightly may term wealthy in its two thousand six hundred and ninety-seven titles2 of numbered pieces of literature, besides being based largely on the author’s own choice collection of Philippina, cites also fourteen other bibliographies of that archipelago.3

In his own list of Philippine languages, or branch-tongues, of this quarter of Malaysia, in all (as he gives them) thirty-seven in number, some are mentioned, that, except in a broad sense, will not easily be recognized as members of the distinctively Philippine family; such as Sanscrit, Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Nahuatl of Central America, along with Kanaka or Ponapé,4 Chamorro and Malgacho, or Malagasy, as we more familiarly style it, three dialects spoken in lands outside of the Philippine zone,—of Yap, or Guap, in the eastern Carolines, the Marianas, or Ladrones, and Madagascar respectively.

Wherefore, subtracting these nine foreign localized idiom-groups along with Malay (presumably ancestral tongue of the Philippines, as of other western Polynesian languages), though herein many scholars hold that Aeta, or Papuan, is mother, I have reduced the idioms peculiar (in large measure) to that archipelago itself to the number (given ahead)—twenty-seven.

On this question of race and idiom unity Zúñiga, whom I cite frequently in this sketch, says that the vocabularies of New Zealand, New Holland, New Guinea, and part of New Hebrides (gathered by Captain Cook) were all easily understood by him through his familiarity with Philippine dialects; that, moreover, from his knowledge of the racial and linguistic characteristics of nearly all South Sea islanders, especially of the peoples from Madagascar to Easter Island, including (he distinctly declares) the natives of the Friendly, or Society Isles, of the Sandwich and Marquesas groups, he was of opinion that aboriginal stock of all, in tongue and blood, including even the natives of Central America, was Aeta, or Papuan, otherwise styled (in the Philippines) Negrito.5 As far back as the early part of the seventeenth century this same question of race and language identity of the Philippine people was treated by the Jesuit Chirino, of whom we shall say more further on; then later by another Jesuit scholar, at one time provincial superior of his society in the Philippines, Francisco Colín, in his Lavor evangelica, (Madrid, 1663); and by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, a linguist of deserved eminence in the world of letters, formerly Jesuit. See his Catalogo (in six quarto vols., Madrid, 1800–1805), and you will learn very much about many strange things, among others, that the theory maintained by the English Wallace, the German Blumentritt, and later ethnologists, as to the identity of these Polynesians—Papuans and Malays—perhaps the only one now held by scholars—is venerably old, by two centuries and more. But really, in view of the apparently irreconcilable opinions of linguists on this topic, further discussion of it seems unprofitable.

As concerns the Philippines themselves, neither have their isles all been numbered, nor their