Note 313 — Chapter XV

That the words are now incomprehensible may have arisen from the fact that the songs were originally intended only to recall things to those already instructed, in the same way that Mexican picture records “do not tell their stories in full, but only recall them to the minds of those who are already acquainted with them” (E. B. Tylor, p. 96). As instruction and memory lapsed the words would become mere gibberish. Certainly all these tribes appear to have songs they can no longer interpret. La danse est accompagnée des chantes; je regrette de n’avoir pu saisir le sens de leurs paroles (Crevaux, p. 104). There are old dances with words no longer understood among the Tukano (Koch-Grünberg, p. 254). This is, of course, by no means peculiar to the Amazonian Indians. Some of the singing games played by children in British New Guinea have words whose meanings are either obscure or lost (Barton, J.R.A.I., p. 269). Among the Naga tribes the language of the songs “is known in many cases to be now unintelligible to those who sing them” (Hodson, Naga Tribes, p. 68). Corrobborees are passed from one tribe to the other among the Australian natives, “the result is that the words are, as a general rule, quite unintelligible to the performers” (Spencer and Gillen, Central Australia, p. 281). Zulu charm songs are said to be incomprehensible to the singers (Callaway, Religious System of the Amazulu, p. 413). These instances might be multiplied, but they suffice to show that this survival of words with lost meanings is world-wide.

As a curious contrast to this we find that the Spanish missionaries in South America complained that they had great difficulty in getting their converts to remember the Ave Maria and the Paternoster “seeing that the words were mere nonsense to them” (Tylor, p. 96). It should not be forgotten though, in this connection, that the potency of a word is in inverse ratio to its incomprehensibility. Cf. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 92.