iS I' hi- I j)ii;^uai^cs i>i I he' I'aciUc. 



If tliereh irc Uktc i^ a (lillereiicc l)L'l\\cL-n the Polynesian phonology 

 and thai ol those to the west ol it we may assume that it was a 

 change of mothers that caused it: t'or right through the seven 

 thousand miles from Tonga to the coast of India the climatic 

 enviromnent is j^ractically the same, moist heat governed hy regular- 

 1\- hliiwing winds. 



Xow the phonology of the Polynesian dialects dilTers hy a 

 whole world from that of all the languages to the west of it. The 

 former have only twelve to fifteen sounds, the five vowels and seven 

 to ten consonants, the most primitive outfit that any language in 

 the world has. As soon as you step out of Polynesia westward, 

 say from Tonga to the neighboring Fiji, the language has from 

 twenty to thirty sounds, and this holds right to the coast of India 

 and all through India. Further, there are sounds to these languages 

 to the west that no Polynesian could l:)y any training be made capable 

 of pronouncing, nay that no European could, i.e. the speech organs 

 are ab.solutely different in the two regions. One instance is the 

 c}=kpz^< of Melanesia. I)Ut the fundamental principle that divides 

 Polynesian plionologically from all to the west is that it must close 

 a syllable or a word with a vowel, and it cannot pronounce twd 

 consonants together. All the languages to the west can not only 

 close a word with a consonant, but many of them (including Malay) 

 prefer to do so. The only tw'o languages in the Pacific Ocean that 

 have the same phonological laws are Japanese, away to the north- 

 west, and Quichua. away to the southeast ; but the former is 

 grammatically of a different type, the agglutinative, and the latter, 

 though almost grammarless, like Polynesian, has inflections only in 

 the pronouns, including the strange Polynesian characteristic of a 

 different form in the first person for the plural that includes those 

 spoken to and the plural that excludes those spoken to. I have found 

 Init a small i)ercentage of Ouichua words or roots the same as in 

 Polyne-sjan, while the range of sounds in Japanese is nearly the same 

 as in Polynesian. 



There is one other characteristic of Polynesian phonology that 

 almost puts out of court the accepted theory that the Polynesian 

 languages came from India or the Malay archipelago. They are 

 divided into / languages and r languages. In P'olynesia / has a 

 little of the trill of the r and the r has somewdiat of the licjuidity of 



16] 



