The Days of a Man 1902 



Marquesas n. And a great similarity of words 

 throughout the whole region plainly shows that the 

 Common various dialects must all go back to a single root; 

 thus aloha, the Hawaiian goodby, has its counterpart 

 in talofa, the Samoan greeting. In all these tongues, 

 moreover, words are frequently doubled for emphasis 

 or, more often, in order to convert an adjective into a 

 noun; thus ele, rusty, ele-ele, a rusty-red fish; sama, 

 yellow, sama-sama, a very yellow fish. 



In Samoa, as elsewhere, alien words are from time 

 to time taken over and domesticated. 1 Some years 

 ago a pair of cattle were brought to Apia from New 

 Zealand. Hearing them spoken of as "a bull and a 

 cow," the natives first evolved the single compre- 

 hensive word, bulimacau, then pulimatu, after which 

 (in further lingual economy) the latter form came to 

 serve for everything related to a cow milk, butter, 

 horns, leather, even shoes! In the same way, selini 

 (shilling) covers monetary transactions. 



Our real business, of course, had to do with the fish 

 fauna of Upolu and Tutuila. Scenery and literary 

 excursions were merely charming breaks in many 

 weeks of almost continuous collecting among the 

 corals. For that part of the work which involved 

 catching large fishes of reef channels, we had secured 

 from Captain Sebree all the dynamite at Pago Pago. 

 The scholarly German governor of Upolu, Dr. Albert 

 H. Schnee, not to be outdone in courtesy, then sold 



1 An excellent example of this tendency is the French "fivodoquer" used by 

 Paris when it drinks afternoon tea, conventionally taken at five o'clock. Another 

 is the recently coined German phrase used by the beneficiaries of the Society 

 of Friends: " Ich werde gequakert" 



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