Tregear. — The Anjo-Semitic Maori. 401 



to real philology at last, to the phonetic bases of the linguistic 

 divisions into families — perhaps at last to the bases of linguistic 

 unity. As a general rule, there can be little doubt but that 

 languages which use the same sounds to express the same ideas 

 are near akin, and from the same primal source. This has been 

 the idea — and, in substance, the only idea — which has made 

 philology possible : it was solely the likeness of sound and sense 

 perceived between words of Hindostanee and words of European 

 languages which wrought the discovery of the Aryan unity, 

 although afterwards strengthened by other assistance, such as 

 that of grammatical forms, etc. Further research has made it 

 certain that many of these resemblances were not justifiable in 

 comparison ; nay, those persons who love paradox and exaggera- 

 tion delight in stating that if two words resemble each other in 

 sound and sense it is a proof that they are not connected. This 

 would destroy the connection between the English "brother" 

 and the Sanscrit bhratri, between our "stand" and the Sanscrit 

 sthd — but such assertion really hardly needs denial. How- 

 ever we may track a word historically, we get to a dim twilight 

 at last, in which we see the word being written down by an 

 unknown scribe, in letters whose values differed according to 

 the differing phonetic values assigned to them by this writer: 

 briefly, this early penman, or rock-cutter, was then doing for 

 his particular dialect yesterday what the missionary is doing 

 in Polynesia to-day — i.e., writing by sound ; and it cannot be 

 doubted that comparison between words in such a similar stage 

 is very fairly permissible. Mr. Atkinson states that I take 

 Aryan words in any period of growth, and compare these with 

 Maori : I answer that in many cases I do this intentionally ; with 

 this much of reason, — that many words have scarcely changed to 

 any extent within the historic period, and it matters little at 

 what stage comparison is made with these. If I do not (or, 

 rather, did not) give the oldest form, it was because I did not 

 wish to cloud the sense of the passage by carrying the reader 

 through strings of derivations, not always clear without long 

 explanation. Had I taken the oldest form of the word obtain- 

 able, it would always have been to the advantage of the Aryan- 

 Maori theory. Thus, I compared the Maori hoko, " to barter" 

 (modern, "to buy or sell"), with the English "hawker," one who 

 buys and sells ; but the Teutonic words (German, hoken, " to 

 higgle ;" Danish, hoker, " a huckster"), which have kept the 

 old form better than the English, are also nearer the Maori. 

 So with the English word " hook," which I compared with the 

 Maori hake, " crooked." A Maori is perfectly able to say huka, 

 and does use the word in a different sense, but does not mean a 

 "hook" thereby: his word hake (-/HAK), "bent," (compare 

 ahaaka, " bent like a large hook," Colenso,) is akm to the word 

 whence our modern form is derived, the Anglo-Saxon haaca, 

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