168 COOK AND cook: the maho or mahagua 



Seemann. Even the breadfruit tree has a fibrous bark and is 

 sometimes used to make bark cloth. One of several names for 

 breadfruit is mai, which could be considered a variant of mhu, 

 as fai replaces fau in some of the islands. 



]\Iaho words also appear to be used in the general sense of 

 bush or woods, maho thickets being the only forest on some of 

 the smaller islands. Thus in Samoa la'au is tree, timber, or 

 firewood; vao is bush, vai vau, unoccupied land between two 

 villages, and vaomaoa, the forest. In Hawaii wao is "a wild 

 place," while inahakea is jungle or uncultivated land. In the 

 Quichua language of Peru 7nahiska means abandoned and mahini 

 to go wild. 



maho names of the western pacific 



In many of the Micronesian islands the names of the maho are 

 compound words, Hli fau, kini fau, gill fau, gili fai, giri fai, 

 gini fai, probably meaning bark-/flM, to distinguish from the 

 -other applications of the word. Christian states that in Ponape 

 the maho is called kalau, while in another island kalaua means 

 bark. In Yap the name of the maho is kal. In the Paumotu 

 also kiri means bark or cloth, equivalent to ere among the 

 Hawaiians, and to iri, meaning skin. 



Christian gives pa and pe from two of the Caroline Islands. 

 In Siam po is a name for a related fibrous-barked shrub, Hibiscus 

 macrophyllus. In China ma is an ancient name for hemp, rep- 

 resented in writing by an independent radical which appears in 

 many compound names of other plants. 



It may be doubted whether names like vahu, halibago, mid pago, 

 used in Fiji, the Philippine Islands, and Guam, also belong to 

 the maho series, but relation seems possible in view of intermedi- 

 ate Polynesian forms like bago, crooked, faga, to bend, and haga, 

 to form or to build. In addition to the ndore prominent Tagalog 

 ■ name balibdgo, Merrill's Dictionary of the Native Plant Na7nes of 

 the Philippine Islands gives balabdgo, malabago, malabayo, and 

 raquindi, with numerous ^^ariants or compounds of bali and bago 

 as names of other plants. Names reported from Madagascar 

 and neighboring islands, baro, foulsapate, var, varo, vau, vaur, 

 appear to connect with the Malay and Polynesian series. Van 



