With patience we learnt a great number of substantives, the names of animals, the parts of the body, the various possessions of the natives and so forth, and with more difficulty we learnt some of the active verbs. But when we came to abstract ideas, our researches ceased abruptly for lack of the question words, who, how, where, when, etc.; these we were never able to learn, and it is impossible to act them.
Thus we were never able to find out what they thought of various things; we could point to the moon and be told its name, but we were never able to say, “What is the moon?” We learnt the names of lightning and thunder, but we never knew who they thought produced them. We could not find out where their stone axes came from, nor how old they were, nor who made them; and a hundred other questions, which we should have liked to put, remained unanswered.
These limitations of our knowledge of the language were particularly annoying when we tried to find out the simplest ties of relationship. It may be thought very unintelligent of us that we never learnt the word for father, in spite of many attempts to do so. If you pointed to a child and asked a man, knowing him to be the father, what the child was, he would slap himself on the chest and answer, “_Dorota kamare_” (my penis); then if you pointed to himself he would tell you his own name, but never any word that could possibly be construed as father. If you tried the same thing with the mother she would point to the child and say, “_Dorota auwë_” (my breast). The child on being questioned pointed to the father and always said his name, the mother it would call _Aína_ (woman), but perhaps this word also means mother.
There were two men at Parimau so much alike as to be unmistakably brothers; we learnt their names and that they were _Inakwa kamare_ (one penis), but we never found out the name of their relationship.
Seeing that some of the people have a very good idea of drawing on the ground a map of the country, I tried one day a graphic method of obtaining the relationships of a man whose name and whose wife’s name and son’s name I knew. I put sticks on the ground to represent him and his wife and son, and then in a tentative sort of way put in a stick to represent his father, whose name he mentioned, but the game did not interest him and my researches came to an end.