(M205) The Battas or Bataks of Sumatra display a great aversion to mentioning their own names and a still greater aversion to mentioning the names of their parents, grandparents, or elder blood-relations. Politeness forbids the putting of direct questions on this subject, so that the investigation of personal identity becomes difficult and laborious. When a Batta expects to be questioned as to his relations, he will usually provide himself with a friend to answer for him.(1279) A Batak man may never mention the names of his wife, his daughter-in-law and of his son-in-law; a woman is most particularly forbidden to mention the name of the man who has married her daughter.(1280) Among the Karo-Bataks the forbidden names are those of parents, uncles, aunts, parents-in-law, brothers and sisters, and especially grandparents.(1281) Among the Dyaks a child never pronounces the names of his parents, and is angry if any one else does so in his presence. A husband never calls his wife by her name, and she never calls him by his. If they have children, they name each other after them, “Father of So-and-so” and “Mother of So-and-so”; if they have no children they use the pronouns “he” and “she,” or an expression such as “he or she whom I love”; and in general, members of a Dyak family do not mention each other’s names.(1282) Moreover, when the personal names happen also, as they often do, to be names of common objects, the Dyak is debarred from designating these objects by their ordinary names. For instance, if a man or one of his family is called Bintang, which means “star,” he must not call a star a star (_bintang_); he must call it a _pariama_. If he or a member of his domestic circle bears the name of Bulan, which means “moon,” he may not speak of the moon as the moon (_bulan_); he must call it _penala_. Hence it comes about that in the Dyak language there are two sets of distinct names for many objects.(1283) Among the sea Dyaks of Sarawak a man may not pronounce the name of his father-in-law or mother-in-law without incurring the wrath of the spirits. And since he reckons as his father-in-law and mother-in-law not only the father and mother of his own wife, but also the fathers and mothers of his brothers’ wives and sisters’ husbands, and likewise the fathers and mothers of all his cousins, the number of tabooed names may be very considerable and the opportunities of error correspondingly numerous. To make confusion worse confounded, the names of persons are often the names of common things, such as moon, bridge, barley, cobra, leopard; so that when any of a man’s many fathers-in-law and mothers-in-law are called by such names, these common words may not pass his lips.(1284) Among the Dyaks of Landak and Tajan it is forbidden to mention the names of parents and grandparents, sometimes also of great-grandparents, whether they are alive or dead.(1285) Among the Alfoors or Toradjas of Poso, in central