llic iMiii^uai^cs of the Pacific. 19 



of the / so that it is easy for one to pass into the other. But the 

 southern groups have a preference for the r sound, so that the 

 missionaries have always written this consonant in their language 

 as r, whilst the northern have a preference for the / sound ; these 

 are Tonga, Samoa, Futuna, Tokelau and Hawaii : all the rest except 

 Marquesas use r; that group has a rule neither r nor /. If we 

 step out of Polynesia and g'o west, every language uses both r and /. 

 I should like to have explained to me how, if the Polynesian 

 languages came east into the central and eastern Pacific, they were 

 • able to divide off the / speakers and the r speakers after coming 

 through seven thousand miles of languages that used botJi r and /. 

 Undoubtedly in the now submerged fatherland, Hawaiki, probably 

 lying well to the south of the equator and to the east of Samoa and 

 Tonga and the Tokelau group, the peoples in the north and north- 

 west of it preferred the /, those in the south and southeast preferred 

 the r; though the preference had not grown as pronounced as it is 

 now, it had been made perhaps through that contradictoriness which 

 dictates the fashions of neighbors, probably more pronounced because 

 the northern tribes were nearer the equator and preferred the 

 sound that needed less tensity and energy in the organs of speech 

 That Hawaiki was to the east of Samoa and Tonga is evident in 

 the fact that the spirit land of the two groups is not Hawaiki, but 

 Bulotu, which is probably from the Fijian biilubulii, the grave, and 

 /;/(///, the abode of departed spirits, modified by the Polynesian 

 purotu, pure, pleasant, agreeable, soft, delicate, beautiful. Burotn 

 is in Fiji the residence of the gods and the place of spirits; so it is 

 in Samoa and Tonga. Next to the northern tribes of Hawaiki must 

 have lived the Tahitians, for they, like the Samoans and Hawaiians, 

 eliminated the guttural k that had come with the primeval Polynes- 

 ians from the colder north and continued in all the languages that, 

 like those of Tonga, the Maoris, the Paumotus and the Austral 

 Islands, Mangareva and Easter Island, drifted further south into a 

 colder zone. But, to show the influence of climate on the organs of 

 speech, the Hawaiians, when they got up to the borders of the 

 temperate zone, though they did not restore the primeval k, began to 

 substitute for it the t of all the other Polynesian dialects. The 

 Marquesans had already begun on Hawaiki to avoid the rolling r 

 and the liquid / and when they reached the steep-to islands in which 



