392 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



island world. Within the limits of such an introductory paper as this it must 

 suffice to say that the investigation has been pushed with uniformly confirma- 

 tory results for the several phonetic elements of the Samoan, and that close 

 comparative dissection of many groups of Polynesian is yielding wonderful 

 results along the line just indicated. 



Having cited the "Cratylus" it will be impossible to avoid the comparison 

 •with the childish linguistic guesses which Plato puts into the mouth of Socrates, 

 the p of motion, the shaking, agitating, swelling 0, xj/, a, <:; the binding, resting 

 8 and t, the smooth and gliding X. The results of many years investigation 

 of Polynesian speech point more and more distinctly all the time to such 

 possibilities as Plato seems dimly to have foreseen. 



In this series of roots to which attention has been at such length directed we 

 have accumulated one general sense, the non-ego under certain relations, the 

 nature of such relations varying mth the consonantal coefficient. 



There yet remains to us to investigate the naked vowel a devoid of all 

 coefficients, the prunary and unmodulated sound of lungs and larynx regarded 

 solely as a reed instrument of the type of soft-walled resonator. To accord 

 with the scheme which we have seen to develop in the examination of its 

 modulated variants this a, when absolute, should express, so far as is possible 

 for the human mind in any early plane of progress to conceive the abstract, 

 the sense of the non-ego and the not-here and the not-now. We need not 

 fear to assign the capacity of the abstract to a primitive people of so elemental 

 a type as the Proto-Samoan. In that formative stage the object to which 

 the name is to be applied is most narrowly concrete, none the less it is plain 

 that the name that is applied to that object is a diffuse abstract, the expression 

 of some qualitj^ which may serve to assist the identification made primarily 

 by the indicative finger. Thus so general a statement as our qru-kan identifies 

 the sweet singing bird and we find it in its rossignol shape serving for nightin- 

 gale, song sparrow, and mocking bird. "And he called their name Adam in 

 the day when they were created," nothing could be more concrete than the 

 one man of Paradise, the one man of all the world, yet the Talmudic gloss 

 shows the name to be so abstract a quality as redness. . . . 



Thus we have completed the cycle of the Samoan roots in this a and we have 

 shown the greatest common divisor of the series to consist of the essential 

 idea of the naked a. Roots of other series have been in this research worked 

 out along parallel I ines to a similar result. Even the apparently closed roots, 

 where sufficient have been identified to form a series, show that the same 

 principle is operative. Is it, then, too much to claim for our Polynesian that 

 it offers us something infinitely more primitive than the root in linguistics? 

 Call it seed if it be worth while to preserve the classic imagery of the stem 

 and the root. The name is of no moment; it is momentous that the Poly- 

 nesian is being made to yield to philology forms of speech so embryonic that 

 by them we can place ourselves at a point where the near vision must jaeld 

 us the view of a speech in the making, even if not the genesis of speech itself. 



As speech is the means of the expression of a thought which precedes the 

 physical fact of utterance, we shall find the one conditioning the other, philol- 

 ogy and psychology interacting in every earliest stage of speech development 

 to comprehension of which we may attain. The delver after philological 

 origins must call upon the psychologist for a better understanding of the diffuse 

 and nebulous word meanings to which he is irresistiblj' led, and in the same 

 measure these expressions of the most primitive concepts in turn prove instruc- 

 tive to the student of the psychology of the infancy of mankind. These 

 researches into the Polynesian, therefore, may be expected to possess for the 

 psychologist an interest second only to that which they have for the special 

 student of speech. 



