24 '///(• Liiiii^itagcs (if the Pacific. 



times as many words with a as the vowel as those with any one of 

 the other four vowels, c, i. o. it. h'rom a in l)oth languatJes there 

 are two series of nuitations (• and /' on the one hand and o and ;(- 

 on the other. if von look into l'"ick's indo-I'.nropean dictionary, 

 yon will find ten times more roots with (/ as the vowel than those 

 tliat have c or /, o or ;(. And as far as I can judge hy analysis of 

 the roots of more than one syllable or two letters, they are all 

 reducible to roots of one or two sounds, a pure vowel or a consonant 

 and a vowel. In other words i)rimeval Indo-European had the same 

 sound law as Polynesian, i. e. it preferred to close a syllable or word 

 with a vowel. 



There is one other point that the discovery of Tocharish settles, 

 it is that the western European type of language came east into 

 Asia. Aryan languages are divided into two sections by a line drawn 

 from the Baltic to the Black Sea. West of that all the languages 

 retain the original A' sound. East of it all reduce it to a sibilant, at 

 least all till Tocharish was discovered. The former are called by 

 philologists the centiiiii languages from the Latin word for one hun- 

 dred ; the latter the Sato languages from the Sanskrit word for one 

 hundred. Tocharish retains the k unchanged to s, and must there- 

 fore have come east long before Sanskrit hived ofif and traveled into 

 Asia. Polynesian also retains the k unchanged into jr, and it too 

 with the same sound-range as Tocharish and the primeval Aryan 

 languages must have traveled from Europe west of the line between 

 the Baltic and the Black Sea through Asia, long before Sanskrit 

 began its long migration into India or even began its elatorate 

 inflectional system. That inflectional system had begun before it 

 completely separated from its cousins ; for many of its inflections 

 have close kinship wdth those of Greek, Latin and the Teutonic 

 languages. Even Polynesian, which shows an extremely primitive 

 beginning of inflections in the personal pronouns (the dual in ua 

 and the ])lural in on ), must have hived off and gone east before the 

 inflectionalism had developed to any great extent. There could have 

 been little or no formal grammar, as we can see in Tocharish ; the 

 same word could be used as noun, adjective, adverb or verb; and 

 particles supplied the cement or binding element of the sentence. 



Of course every dialect of Polynesia has a large percentage 

 of its words and roots pecidiar to itself ; Hawaiian has, I should 



[12] 



