2 Transactions. 



Another principle to be insisted on is that all the letters of a word must be 

 taken into consideration. If the Mota vula (moon) is compared with the 

 Malay hulan, the n must be accounted for ; if namu (mosqmto) is compared 

 svvith namoJc, the k must be accounted for. In these two cases the n and A: 

 suffixes, common in Malay nouns, are of great interest to the philologist. 

 It is common to ignore single letters, especially at the end of a word. Much 

 of great interest and value is thus passed by. 



It is perhaps best to set aside onomatopoeic words, interesting as they 

 are. The author of " Maori and Polynesian " compares the Maori mumu 

 (to hum) with the Latin murmurare (to murmm-), while " koJco (the tui) 

 may be set beside the Sanskrit l-akh (to laugh), English ' quack ' and 

 ^ cackle.' "* Probably such words appear in all languages. There is a Malay 

 word for " dog," asu, and this is found in Melanesia, but not in Polynesia ; 

 so it has been supposed that the Maori au (to bark) represents the Malay 

 asu (a dog) — in fact, that nothing but the bark is left in New Zealand. It 

 is a comparison one is loth to forego when one remembers the classic case 

 of the Cheshire cat ; but one must allow that " au au " is very like the 

 sound a dog makes everywhere. 



It seems reasonable to suppose that the fuller form of a word is the root. 

 We are familiar enough with shortened forms — cab, from cabriolet ; bus, 

 from omnibus ; car, from carriage ; phone, from telephone. It is, no doubt, 

 a common process in all languages. Now, if we take any word of two or 

 three letters (not a particle) in any Ocean language, it appears to be the 

 case that a fuller form of the word can always be found in some other lan- 

 guage. Of course, the fuller form may have been lost everywhere, but no 

 such case has come under the writer's observation. These fuller forms 

 consist of two consonants and two vowels, or, at least, of two syllables. 

 Thus, though hua is " moon" in one language of Indonesia, hula is found 

 in others ; though niu is '' cocoanut " in many Oceanic languages, niru 

 is found in one (Vella Lavella). It also appears to be the case that no 

 root-forms occur of more than two syllables. There are many longer words 

 in the vocabularies, but they are either roots plus a prefix or suffix or they 

 are compound words. Thus, in the Mota word nonom (think) the m is the 

 common Oceanic verbal suffix ; in the Mota malumhim (soft), ma is the 

 common adjectival prefix, while lumlum is the reduplicated root {lumu). 

 The Florida tidalo (a god) is a compomid word, ti appearing also in tinoni 

 (a living man), whatever the meaning may be of dalo — the same word, 

 doubtless, as the San Cristoval ataro (a god) ; Mota tataro (a prayer) — 

 from the first word with which all prayers or charms began ; Tahitian 

 tarotaro (a short prayer to the gods). The Florida word appears to 

 be indirect evidence that the primitive religion of the people was 

 ancestor-worship. The Mota geara (a fence) is really two words — ge and 

 ara — a form of the latter being commonly used for " fence " in Oceanic 

 languages. 



* I cannot refrain from giving instances of the ciirious reasoning and inaccurate 

 statements in the chapter of this book entitled " The Maori as seen in his Language " : 

 " Malay, as the tongue of a Mongoloid people, is assumed to be agghitinative, . . . . 

 But there is nothing agglutinative about [Maori] .... Now, the only inflectional 

 languages are either Aryan or Semitic." Tnerefore Maori is either Aryan or Semitic ! 

 So much for the reasoning. Later on he speaks of the " coincidence of Maori ruma (an 

 apartment), used all through the Pacific in the sense of house, with the English ' room.' " 

 Now, there is no such Maori word at all, and, though ruma does occur in Melanesia, 

 neither the word itself nor any form of it is known to occur in Polynesia. 



