NOTES ON THE LANGUAGE OF EOTUMA. 



THE materials for the following remarks were obtained, as has been elsewhere stated, 

 during a brief intercourse with some natives of this island, whom we met at Tongatabu and 

 at the Feejee Group. Although, from the unfavorable circumstances under which the 

 notes were made, they are necessarily very imperfect, they may yet serve to give some 

 idea of the nature of the language, and its relations to other idioms. 



Great difficulty was experienced in fixing satisfactorily the orthography of many of the 

 words, owing partly to the extreme indistinctness of the pronunciation, and partly to 

 certain changes which most of them undergo in accordance with a peculiar system of 

 euphony. Add to this, that numerous contractions occur, in which vowels are dropped, 

 and separate words are confounded in one. 



A general law appears to be, that when a word stands by itself, not followed by another 

 on which it depends, it must terminate in a vowel, and this appears to be the proper and 

 original form of most of the words; but when combined, in any way whatsoever, with 

 other words, an alteration takes place, by which the concluding syllable is so transposed 

 or contracted as that the consonant shall be the final letter. The following examples will 

 show the effect of this singular law : 



ORIGINAL FORM. CONSTRUCT FORM. 



hula, moon hual rua, two moons 



uhi, yam uh' rua, two yams 



In iii, wind Ifay ma, heavy wind 



ohoni, mother uhiin -ta, the mother 



ala, to die aF moroa, dead a long time 



mose, to sleep po kat mos (or mots) ra, I did not sleep. 



This altered or construct form of the words is the one in which they are the most com- 

 monly heard, and many of those given in the vocabulary are in this state, a circum- 

 stance which, in some measure, disguises their similarity to the corresponding Polynesian 

 terms. The distortions produced by this change, and by contraction, are frequently very 

 great. Thus, the word for woman, which is honi or hani, becomes by this change, 

 haian or haian, and by contraction hun and hin, in which last form it is most commonly 

 heard. ^ 



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