482 Transactiom. — Miscellaneous. 



Art. LXIY.— The Track of a Word. 



By E. Teegeak, F.K.G.S. 

 [Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, ith August, 1886.] 



In seeking to attract attention to the immense geographical 

 district over which a word may be in nse, and to the very great 

 periods of time during which a word must necessarily have 

 existed, I would confine myself mainly to a record of the facts 

 concerning it collected by modern science, and leave for discus- 

 sion the points arising from such record. The word I propose 

 to examine is the Maori noun mata, which means " the eye," or 

 " face." This word has been often commented upon as one which 

 maintained itself most purely and with little phonetic variation 

 among the dialects spoken in Polynesia ; but I believe that the 

 full significance of its very extraordinary diffusion over a large 

 area of the world's surface has not been sufficiently observed or 

 commented on. We will now, with the aid of a map, pass 

 along a track where this word, sometimes in a form exceedingly 

 pure, sometimes corrupted almost beyond recognition, may be 

 found in the spoken languages of mankind at the present 

 moment. 



Leaving New Zealand and moving to the northward, we 

 arrive at the Fijian Group, the natives of which, although not 

 Polynesians, retain in their language many Polynesian words, 

 and these in great purity. Here we find it mata, as in Maori ; 

 thence journeying eastward to Samoa, it is nuita : at Rarotonga 

 and Mangaia (Cook's and Hervey Islands), it is mata ; at Tahiti 

 (Society Islands), mata ; at Nukuhiva (Marquesas Islands), mata ; 

 at Easter ls\a,nd, mata ; at Hawaii (Sandwich Islands), maka. 

 This course has passed through the principal Polynesian islands, 

 and before proceeding further I must digress for a brief space to 

 notice the dialectical change producmg the variant /.• of the 

 Hawaiian. The change from t to k seems at first sight to be 

 peculiar, and to those who have not made the transference of 

 sounds a specialty of study appears almost impossible. But it 

 is by no means confined to the Polynesian ; in many languages 

 far more advanced this letter-change occurs : in the Latin, 

 Basciili and Bastnii, Vectones and Vettojics ; in Danish, mukkf, 

 for English " to mutter," and laktuk (Latin lactiica), for English 

 "lettuce ;" iu Greek we find the Doric makes t»Vd for o-e, ttjioq 

 for KEiyoc ; the modern French of low-class Canadians gives 

 mekier for metier, muikie for uioilie, according to Professor Max 

 Miiller,* on whose choice of this word mata as a text I shall 

 have much to say at a future time ; but here it is only necessary 



* Miiller, " Science of Language," 2nd series, p. 168. 



