16 EASTER ISLAND. 



error would not arise if it were possible to employ comprehensible sym- 

 bols expressive each of a germ-sound somewhere midway within those 

 pairs of mutes which we classify as sonant and surd ; and in the case of 

 the labials the range is wider, for we find not only an interplay between 

 sonant and surd, but even one of such wide range as to admit of frequent 

 interchanges between mute and spirant; and sometimes this extends 

 as far as the aspiration, and even to the semi-vowel proximate to the 

 labial series. 



This suggestion of a germ-sound I think it feasible to illustrate by an 

 example from English which doubly covers the point. In a British 

 colony, where the common speech is retentive of certain quasi-dialectic 

 peculiarities not unknown in the mother country, but noticeable because 

 of their reasonable unfamiliarity in American common speech, I heard 

 frequently the locution "wisitors, vorshipful sir!" If it be objected 

 that this is uneducated English the objection is not a valid one, for we 

 are using this for comparison with the speech of Polynesian ancestors far 

 removed from the possibility of formal education. The speaker of this 

 test phrase could not have acquired his error through eye education, for 

 in the characters V and W there can be no confusion, provided the sight 

 is sufficiently educated to distinguish one acute angle from two acute 

 angles. That the speech contained these two errors is in part an audi- 

 tory laches, but there is something beyond this, a determining factor. 

 A child in one of our primary schools who should thus exchange his V 

 and his W would become the immediate object of the teacher's best 

 effort to correct the error, and would be the butt of the excessively 

 educational ridicule of his fellow children as soon as recess gave oppor- 

 tunity for this potent form of schooling. That this interplay between 

 labial spirant and proximately labial semivowel and vice versa, a plunge 

 over a great gap, endured in a number of individuals, schooled if not 

 educated, is evidential that the error was not corrected by those in 

 monitorial authority. Passing unperceived, it is in that community 

 non-existent as error. If it were heard at all, the error would become 

 the object of attention and of correction, for it exists side by side with 

 the absence of eye-error, that is to say the false speaker spells correctly. 



By careful attention of the ear I found that these speakers said 

 neither vorshipful nor worshipful, neither wisitors nor visitors, but an 

 intermediate sound or two slightly variant sounds, somewhere midway 

 between the sounds accepted by us as standard, the germ-sound. Let 

 us temporarily represent this by WV. What was said, then, was the 

 midway sounds, WVorshipful and WVisitors. Upon our ears, attuned 

 to a sharp distinction between V and W, the impact of WVorshipful 

 impressed us with the fact that it declined from the recognized W value; 

 therefore we must go the whole distance to our next recognizable sound, 

 the V. Similarly the declension from the standard V in WVisitors 

 carries us without a stop to W. Through this instance may we arrive 



