Tregear. — The Aryo-Sewitic Maori. 413 



Saxon, and the Icelandic snakr, I do not know ; but Hawaiian 

 forms are nearer to European in many words than Maori forms 

 are— perhaps because, as I said in "The Aryan Maori," the 

 Hawaiian may be a later migation. It is curious, too, to notice 

 that "snail" (Maori ngata,) is [magi) from the same root as 

 "snake," whilst "adder" (properly a " nadder ") is the Ger- 

 man natter. I had spoken in " The Aryan Maori " of the "footed 

 serpent," the lizard, being regarded with awe ; it is certain that 

 nga in Polynesia was used for the " lizard." The Marquesans 

 call the large house-lizard nga-nga, a curious word if it is 

 merely the duplicated article. Constantly, in Marquesan, ng 

 changes with k, (as it does in Maori — and in Latin,)* the 

 representative of this word in New Zealand being kakariki, the 

 green lizard, for nganga, ngaka, or ngata-riki.f Thus it seems 

 highly probable that the important part of the word ngata, "a 

 snake," is nga. If it was really the case that the Maoris, like 

 other Polynesians, knew the snake as ngata, nata, or naka, then 

 the missionaries in giving them the word naka for " snake " 

 were unintentionally (even pathetically) giving them back their 

 own word lost for centuries, as I feel certain they unsuspectingly 

 did in a hundred other cases, where words supposed to be 

 pakeha-maori, or corrupted English, may be found in songs and 

 incantations ages old. Be that as it may, anyone who considers 

 that where nga is used in composition as a prefix it is but the 

 plural article "the," can scarcely have examined the subject at 

 all. Setting aside the direct words nga, "to breathe," nganga, 

 "a stone," etc., there are many words prefixed with nga, in 

 which nga evidently has some direct bearing on the sense of 

 the word that no conception of it as merely a prefixed article 

 agglutinated will explain. Whether nga has ever meant naga 

 or not, it seems possible, from the genius of the Polynesian 

 language making a vowel follow a simple consonant, that this 

 double consonant sound ng may once have had a vowel between 

 n and g = na-ga. 



* Marquesan, ikon, for ingoa ; hoki, for hongi, etc. Latin, pingo and 

 pictum, tango and factum. 



t See " Aryan Maori," p. 26. 



