Tregeak. — On Ceremonial Language. 597 



tale, the chief's cough is male, the latter word being the 

 general Polynesian for " cough," the Maori mare, the 

 Tahitian marc, the Hawaiian male, &c. Finagalo, a chief's 

 will or desire, is the Maori hinengaro, the bowels, affections, 

 feelings ; Tahitian hinaaro, desire, affection ; Tongan fina- 

 galo, the mind (applied only to the king) ; Futuna finagaro, 

 the mind, the will, &c. Fetalai, to speak of a high chief, is 

 the Tongan fetalai, to converse, to discuss, where fe is the 

 reciprocal particle and tala means to tell, to speak of, just as 

 it does in Samoan. All the other words could be similarly 

 dissected or compared if worth the trouble. There is not the 

 slightest reason for going outside Polynesia proper to find the 

 equivalents of the words of the chief's language in Samoa. 

 They may be remotely connected with Malay, but Polynesian 

 is not a derivative from Malay, or so modern scholars believe ; 

 the conclusions are rather the other way. 



As to the local antiquity of the chiefs' words, the oldest 

 legendary poem yet collected in Samoa is " The Genealogy of 

 the Sun," and of this the learned translator, the Eev. Mr. 

 Pratt, remarks, " The entire absence of the chiefs' language is 

 one mark of the age of the legend." Thus it would appear 

 that the chiefs' language is of modern growth. These two 

 ceremonial languages (of Java and Samoa) are entirely distinct, 

 and there is no pretence for believing them related, or that 

 the Samoans brought their notion of a courtly language from 

 the Malayan Archipelago. If the ancestors of the Samoans 

 ever dwelt in or passed through the Malayan Archipelago (as 

 they almost certainly did) they must have done so at a period 

 far antecedent to the time when the Javanese invented their 

 courtly language, because that is a thing of comparatively 

 modern growth. 



As a mere suggestion, I consider that the Samoan chiefs' 

 language probably arose from the common Polynesian custom 

 of making certain words tapu, or "prohibited," if they form 

 part of a chief's name. A great many words might after a 

 time become prohibited to inferiors, and only used before men 

 of high rank ; thus gradually a court language might spring up. 

 I trust that I have shown that from a scientific point of view 

 the chiefs' language of Samoa is only of linguistic interest, and 

 has no historical value whatever. 



