DATA AND NOTES. 287 



any vapor. Maori and Tahiti are the only languages in which au means 

 smoke; in each it means vapor in general, each employs more freely a 

 definitive compound, and Maori has several other words for smoke. Hav- 

 ing expanded in signification to mean vapor in general, the only way in 

 which it was possible to make it plain when smoke alone was meant by au 

 was to make the definitive compound fire -vapor auahi. This we find in 

 Maori, in Mangareva, in Rarotonga to mean smoke. In the Marquesas this 

 too means vapor as well. By an odd mischance in Tahiti auahi passed 

 from the smoke to the fire itself, and to designate smoke it became neces- 

 sary to cry back once more to au and devise au auahi. We have seen that 

 in the Marquesas auahi means vapor as well. Passing thence to Hawaii 

 we find that auahi has lost even the memory of the fire and it has broken 

 down in form to uahi, used of any vapor. Judge Andrews, ignorant of the 

 life history of the word, etymologizes this — no other description so fits — 

 as u ooze or milk, and ahi fire ; unfortunately the author of the very respect- 

 able Hawaiian dictionary was no philologist. It is proper to note that in 

 Emerson's English-Hawaiian dictionary (1845) smoke is defined as uahi. 



In Nuclear Polynesia asu carries the vapor idea as well. Samoa differ- 

 entiates by the use of the primitive for smoke and the conduplicate asuasu 

 for haze and mist ; as is commonly the sense of conduplication forms, it is 

 intensive. Futuna employs afu for both. In this area no matter of form 

 change need engage our attention except this of Futuna. It is a particu- 

 larly interesting case, one with a story to tell. 



We have in the material here assembled no record of an s-f mutation; 

 in my more extended studies in Polynesia I have encountered no other 

 instance and but two which are at all near it. We know that the Samoan 

 has the primal form asu. The normal mutation is to h, and thus we have 

 ahu in Tonga, Niue, and Uvea. But Futuna has no aspiration and it does 

 possess the sibilant. Now if Samoan users of the word had carried it to 

 Futuna, Uvea would have learned to say asu. From the Futuna afu we 

 see that the word came to them in the ahu form. Our charts will show 

 us that of the three languages which use ahu Uvea lies almost within sound . 

 But Uvea uses both s and //. If asu had come to Uvea from Samoa asu 

 it would have remained; that it is ahu shows that it came to Uvea from 

 some language in which ahu was the form, and, having the aspirate, Uvea 

 was under no compulsion to change the form which it received. But 

 Futuna had to provide some way of dealing with the inconvenient or dis- 

 agreeable h. In Polynesia h is a mutation result from s and from /. For 

 some reason Futuna felt the impulse to work back from h to / instead of 

 to s, which was all wrong, but, like all error, the more picturesque it is the 

 better does it teach. Now the line is sharply drawn between the s-h and 

 the f-h mutations; s-h is general in Polynesia; f-h occurs only between the 

 Proto-Samoan and certain of the Tongafiti tongues. If, then, Futuna inter- 

 prets the h which is brought to it in terms of / it can only be that the Futuna 

 folk have the Tongafiti Sprachgeist, in other words that they are a Tongafiti 

 folk left behind on their exiguous two islands when the swarm of their 

 fellows swept along to distant discovery. At the beginning of this excursus 

 I mentioned two instances of a near mutation. They involve Samoan salo 

 to rasp (Tonga-Niue halu)Viti varo, Samoan scle to snare Tonga heleViti vcre. 



