For million they gave the vocabulary-hunter the phrase _mil yan chuffa_,
and for billion, _bil yan chuffa_. The word _chuffa_ signifies 1, hence
these expressions are seen at a glance to be coined solely for the purpose
of gratifying a little harmless Choctaw vanity. But this is innocence
itself compared with the fraud perpetrated on Labillardière by the Tonga
Islanders, who supplied the astonished and delighted investigator with a
numeral vocabulary up to quadrillions. Their real limit was afterward found
to be 100,000, and above that point they had palmed off as numerals a
tolerably complete list of the obscene words of their language, together
with a few nonsense terms. These were all accepted and printed in good
faith, and the humiliating truth was not discovered until years
afterward.[137]

One noteworthy and interesting fact relating to numeral nomenclature is the
variation in form which words of this class undergo when applied to
different classes of objects. To one accustomed as we are to absolute and
unvarying forms for numerals, this seems at first a novel and almost
unaccountable linguistic freak. But it is not uncommon among uncivilized
races, and is extensively employed by so highly enlightened a people, even,
as the Japanese. This variation in form is in no way analogous to that
produced by inflectional changes, such as occur in Hebrew, Greek, Latin,
etc. It is sufficient in many cases to produce almost an entire change in
the form of the word; or to result in compounds which require close
scrutiny for the detection of the original root. For example, in the
Carrier, one of the Déné dialects of western Canada, the word _tha_ means 3
things; _thane_, 3 persons; _that_, 3 times; _thatoen_, in 3 places;
_thauh_, in 3 ways; _thailtoh_, all of the 3 things; _thahoeltoh_, all of
the 3 persons; and _thahultoh_, all of the 3 times.[138] In the Tsimshian
language of British Columbia we find seven distinct sets of numerals "which
are used for various classes of objects that are counted. The first set is