434 THE POLYNESIAN WANDERINGS. 



!85 



The Rapanui speech diverges from Proto-Samoan in the loss of the true 

 aspirate, the mutation of the sibilant to an aspirate, and the mutation of 

 f to h . The irregular variants are as follows : 



a-o 61, 233 i-u 321 o-a 137 u-u 125 



lr I-/ 141 l-«. 154 1 — 103, 128 u-o 168 



ng-»g ng-w 125 m-p 141 



Aspiration assumed 158, 270. 



Rapanui differs markedly in its speech from other languages of eastern 

 Polynesia. It carries a far larger element of distinctly Proto-Samoan mate- 

 rial; at the same time it has also a distinctly Tongafiti element, only one 

 item of the latter, however, being involved in the material here assembled. 

 The tradition is clear that Rapanui was peopled by a migrant race, said 

 to have come from a land in the east where periodical droughts killed the 

 vegetation, and since the time of the settler king there have been 56 

 successors. The eastern home is incomprehensible; nothing intervenes 

 between Rapanui and the coast of Chili and Peru in that direction, and 

 nothing in the ethnography of the races there found can be brought into 

 association with the Polynesians of this outlying colony of the South Sea. 

 Nor does this tradition fall into accord with the belief, supported by such 

 evidence as may exist in geographical names, that Rapanui, Great Rapa, 

 was settled from Rapaiti or Rapa the Less. The date of settlement by 

 reduction of the royal line counting four to the century is established at 

 500 a. d. This antedates by a considerable period the arrival of the Tonga- 

 fiti migration in the Pacific. The Tongafiti speech element is proof that 

 the Rapanui settlement must have followed the expulsion of the Tongafiti 

 from Nuclear Polynesia, an event which we have satisfactorily established 

 as synchronous with the Norman Conquest. The traditional date, there- 

 fore, is wholly untrustworthy. The presence of the remarkably large Proto- 

 Samoan content in the speech is clear evidence that in the place whence 

 the Rapanui colonists emigrated the two migration swarms were inter- 

 mingled in peaceful association. No island is now discoverable where the 

 language contains the like proportions of distinctively Proto-Samoan and 

 distinctively Tongafiti elements. The only conclusion permissible is that 

 Rapanui was peopled by a migration in which the two race elements were 

 evenly mixed, therefore a secondary migration from some point of contact 

 of the two migrations. 



The remainder of this added material bears with considerable insistence 

 upon the station of Motu, which in the foregoing discussion has served as 

 the ultimate point in establishment of the Viti Stream of Proto-Samoan 

 migration. It is, accordingly, well worth the apparatus of check-lists and 

 phonetic tables here assembled, the material being associable with that 

 presented and discussed in Chapter VII. 



