Tregear. — The Maori in Asia. 13 



I will beg you to consider this as no mere idle list of words ; 

 many of them arc full of history, and open strange doors into 

 the past of our race. I will give a few instances well worthy of 

 attention : In Maori the word " kotaha " has two meanings, one, 

 that of " a sling," and the other, " part of a chief's head-dress." 

 Very few men now living have seen the chiefs with their hair 

 dressed in the old fashion — the putiki, ngoungou, &c, are not 

 now used. The Maoris do not seem (at all events for a very 

 long time) to have used the sling in warfare, and thus stand in 

 marked contrast to many other Polynesian Islanders, with whom 

 the sling is an effective and terrible weapon. Another Maori 

 word for sling is kopere, and its Sanscrit equivalent is " gopiya" 

 a sling used to drive away cattle — {go, the cow). The Maori 

 word for a fillet, or band for the hair, is pare, so that kopere, a 

 sling, was also a hair-band, like kotaha. But this word pare, a 

 band for the hair, is derived from pareho, the head, and this 

 pareho is only our English word " brow," the forehead. We see 

 this word in two forms in Maori ; the Scottish word brae means 

 the brow of a hill, shortened in Maori into rae, the forehead, or 

 a headland ; again, it is lengthened out into pareho, the head. I 

 was for some time puzzled to know the derivation of the (M.) 

 word korero, to speak or talk. According to my theory of graft 

 words, it should, by its prefix ko, have had originally something 

 to do with " cow." I analysed the part " rero," with these re- 

 sults : Connected with speech is the word a-rero, the tongue, 

 represented by the Polynesian aleh or aledo. In Sanscrit lal is 

 to put out the tongue ; in Greek Mao is to speak, and eiro to 

 speak — these seemed cognate words, but still far from the 

 Sanscrit word " vach," speech. Then, suddenly remembering 

 that the vocative of vach was vak, I saw the connection with 

 (Lat.) racca, a cow. The Sanscrit vach means more than mere' 

 speech or language, it was personified as the Goddess of Speech. 

 In the Atharva-veda we find — " That daughter of thine, Oh 

 Kama, is called the cow, she whom sages denominate Vach," 

 she is the mother of the Vedas, the fount of wisdom, "the melo- 

 dious cow who milked forth sustenance and water." So there 

 is some reason also why the Maoris should call speech " the 

 cow's tongue," korero. Another word for speech in Maori also 

 has the prefix ko, that is koroki — the latter part of this word (by 

 change of /• to /) is (Lat.) loquor, I speak, and (Gr.) logos, a 

 discourse. Yet another and most interesting word, reo, speech 

 or language, has its exact equivalent in the Greek rheo. 

 Rheo meant to flow swiftly ; as a river-word we find it in the 

 Khine, Ehone, &c. ; in New Zealand we find it as re-re, a 

 waterfall. But there was another meaning for rheo, that of 

 speaking quickly, whence came rhema, a discourse, and rhetoric, 

 the art of speaking. From the Anglo-Saxon form, reord, 

 came our English verb to read ; so that two English words, at 



