Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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Father Gili Thinks That The Ature, The
Piraoa, And The Quaqua Or Mapoye, Are Only Dialects Of The Salive.
My
journey was much too rapid to enable me to judge of the accuracy of
this opinion; but we
Shall soon see that, in the village of Ature,
celebrated on account of its situation near the great cataracts,
neither the Salive nor the Ature is now spoken, but the language of
the Maypures. In the Salive of Carichana, man is called cocco; woman,
gnacu; water, cagua; fire, eyussa; the earth, seke; the sky, mumeseke
(earth on high); the jaguar, impii; the crocodile, cuipoo; maize,
giomu; the plantain, paratuna; cassava, peibe. I may here mention one
of those descriptive compounds that seem to characterise the infancy
of language, though they are retained in some very perfect idioms.*
(See volume 1 chapter 1.9.) Thus, as in the Biscayan, thunder is
called the noise of the cloud (odotsa); the sun bears the name, in the
Salive dialect, of mume-seke-cocco, the man (cocco) of the earth
(seke) above (mume).
The most ancient abode of the Salive nation appears to have been on
the western banks of the Orinoco, between the Rio Vichada* and the
Guaviare, and also between the Meta and the Rio Paute. (* The Salive
mission, on the Rio Vichada, was destroyed by the Caribs.) Salives are
now found not only at Carichana, but in the Missions of the province
of Casanre, at Cabapuna, Guanapalo, Cabiuna, and Macuco. They are a
social, mild, almost timid people; and more easy, I will not say to
civilize, but to subdue, than the other tribes on the Orinoco.
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