hich are not identical, are
doubtless different expressions, relationship in this, as in most native
tongues, being indicated with excessive minuteness.

The chain of islands which extend from Trinidad to Porto Rico were
called, from their inhabitants, the Caribby islands. The Caribs,
however, made no pretence to have occupied them for any great length of
time. They distinctly remembered that a generation or two back they had
reached them from the mainland, and had found them occupied by a
peaceful race, whom they styled _Ineri_ or _Igneri_. The males of this
race they slew or drove into the interior, but the women they seized for
their own use. Hence arose a marked difference between the languages of
the island Caribs and their women. The fragments of the language of the
latter show clearly that they were of Arawack lineage, and that the
so-called Igneri were members of that nation. It of course became more
or less corrupted by the introduction of Carib words and forms, so that
in 1674 the missionary De la Borde wrote, that "although there is some
difference between the dialects of the men and women, they readily
understand each other;"[11] and Father Breton in his Carib Grammar
(1665) gives the same forms for the declensions and conjugations of
both.

As the traces of the "island Arawack," as the tongue of the Igneri may
be called, prove the extension of this tribe over all the Lesser
Antilles, it now remains to inquire whether they had pushed their
conquests still further, and had possessed themselves of the Great
Antilles, the Bahama islands, and any part of the adjacent coasts of
Yucatan or Florida.

All ancient writers agree that on the Bahamas and Cuba the same speech
prevailed, except Gomara, who avers that on the Bahamas "great diversity
of language" was found.[12] But as Gomara wrote nearly half a century
after those islands were depopulated, and has exposed himself to just
censure for carelessness in his statements regarding the natives,[13]
his expression has no weight. Columbus repeatedly states that all the
islands had one language though differing, more or less, in words. The
natives he took with him from San Salvador understood the dialects in
both Cuba and Haiti. One of them on his second voyage served him as an
interpreter on the southern shore of Cuba.[14]

In Haiti, there was a tongue current all over the island, called by the
Spaniards _la lengua universal_ and _la lengua cortesana_. This is
di