Brown.- Migrations of the Polynesians 189 



Art. XIX. -The Migrations of the Polynesians according to the Evidence 



oj their Language. 



By Professor J. Macmillan Brown. 



\Head before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 6th September, 1911.] 



In the " Transactions of the Royal Scientific Society of Gottingen " for 

 1909 there appears a long paper on this subject by the late Professor 

 Finck, of Berlin. It attempts, as its title implies, to point out some of 

 the distinctions between the various languages of Polynesia, and by this 

 means to indicate the lines of migration that peopled the islands in which 

 they are spoken. 



The gist of the arguments and conclusions is given in the last two pages, 

 and is somewhat as follows : From the southern Solomons a really united 

 people shifted to the northern fringe of Polynesia on their eastward trek. 

 Before the expedition turned southwards to Samoa the ancestry of the 

 present-day Ellice and Tokelau people branched off. The speech of that 

 time possessed all that marks Polynesian as contrasted with the related 

 Melanesian, especially the use of the old trial as plural, and the employ- 

 ment of separate possessive pronouns where once only a suffix was used ; it 

 was, in fact, probably the fundamental Polynesian tongue. The use of afe 

 for " a thousand " does not contradict this, although it appears in this sense 

 only in Fakaofa, Futuna, Samoa, Tonga, Uvea, and Niue ; for the word 

 is, as the Maori aivhe shows, common to Polynesia ; but it was extruded 

 in the other dialects by mano. There was a long rest in Samoa, as is shown 

 by the use of tokelau for " north " and tonga for " south " in a majority of 

 the groups, words taking this sense from the direction of the Tokelau and 

 the Tonga Groups from Samoa. After a small colony had swarmed off 

 westwards to Futuna, the great eastward-going expedition went south- 

 wards to the Tonga Archipelago, as is shown by the use of h in all the 

 groups to the south and east for s in Samoa and its immediate neighbours, 

 and by the use of toko as a personal prefix to words implying number and 

 quantity in all to the south and east for toka of Samoa, Fakaofa (the Tokelau 

 Group), Vaitupu (Ellice Group), and Futuna. After a short rest in Tonga 

 the expedition went off eastwards, leaving a contingent which sent branches 

 to Niue and Uvea. In the Cook Group it made a long sojourn, and there 

 formed the ground speech of eastern Polynesia ; it changed I into r and 

 / into h before o and u, brought the adnominal particles na and no into 

 use beside the older a and o, and abbreviated the old possessive tou into to. 



From this point various expeditions set out. One went to New Zealand 

 and the Chatham Islands and developed h for / before other vowels than 

 a and o ; it left before the counting by pairs arose that characterizes the 

 other eastern Polynesian dialects. A second went off south-east to Manga- 

 reva ; thence a branch hived off to Easter Island, farther in the same 

 direction, before the birth of the linguistic neologisms that unite the dialects 

 of the Marquesas and Hawaiian Groups with that of Mangareva. the forma- 

 tion of adverbs by prefixing ma or mo to a noun, and the change of tokerau 

 into tokorau. It was long before this northern expedition set out — long- 

 enough to develop these peculiarities. The Marquesas Group developed 

 as linguistic characteristics the pronominal form toia and the further 

 duplication of numeration by pairs in the case of ran (there equal to 400) 

 and mano (there equal to 4,000) before sending off the Hawaiian branch. 

 Meantime from the Cook Group another colony hived off to Tahiti, whose 



