20 EASTER ISLAND. 



That the tongue is the formative agency in the production of the 

 column of consonants from n to t may readily be ascertained. Yet we, 

 with perhaps aeons of race reminiscence of animal needs outweighing 

 man's few days so full of trouble, think first and most commonly of 

 the tongue as the organ of taste. In like manner the exceeding great 

 joy which the labial tract may express and to which at the same time the 

 paired organs half contribute has served to hide from familiar knowledge 

 the fact that they give us the consonant column from m to p. Least 

 conscious are we of the palate at the rear of the mouth in any of its 

 functions, speech or other. 



There is physical reason in this and in the part which each organ 

 plays in speech. The palate is a broad, a diffuse organ ; its musculature 

 does not lend itself to fineness of position. It is easy to observe within 

 ourselves in act of speaking the shifts of position of the tongue and of 

 the lips, but to become familiar with our palates in speech calls for 

 nice observation and particular training. We have been trained to 

 speech for ages, we come of a stock which has acquired a wealth of 

 consonants, yet because of the hardship of adjusting this dull organ, 

 the palate, to a series of frets of which we find it difficult to become 

 conscious, we have consented to forego an entire group of palatals, 

 the spirants, and that within a very recent period. The adult trained 

 to English alone in his early years finds it difficult to master the eh 

 of the German, quite as difficult as the German himself in many of his 

 dialect provinces is finding it to retain the consonant in its purity. 

 Therefore we need feel no surprise that these unskilled men, men so 

 primordial in their speech acquisition that we feel convinced that we 

 are gazing with eager attention and reverence upon the veritable genesis 

 of an art of human speech we should not wonder that they have 

 found it possible to control this difficult organ only so far as to employ 

 the rearward closure of the vibrant column of air no further than to fix 

 but its pianissimo and its fortissimo positions, the nasal ng and the 

 mute k. If we acknowledge that the intermediate positions of the 

 palate, although acquired, are too difficult for us to retain we may 

 not deny the probability that they were too difficult for this race of 

 beginners of speech even to acquire. Rarely in any Polynesian speech 

 do we find so much as the suggestion of a sound resultant from any 

 intermediate positioning of the palate. Because of this absence of the 

 facility to employ intermediate positions we shall find that the two 

 palatals interchange across the whole extent of the range of that organ ; 

 that when, for any reason (and here enters the factor of speech psy- 

 chology as yet almost wholly unstudied) the palatal nasal goes out 

 of favor it may be replaced with the palatal mute, as we find to be 

 the rule in the eastern dialect of the Marquesas, where the Proto- 

 Samoan ng appears as k; similarly the mutation of k to ng is not 

 unknown, although the common treatment of this consonant when it 



