496 COMPENDIUM OF GEOGEAPHY AND TRAVEL 



race, as it is termed by Mr. Eankeii, have been described 

 by Professor A. H. Keane. Those most remarkable are, 

 he says, as follows : — 



1. Their limited phonetic system, consisting of fifteen 

 letters only, five vowels and ten consonants ; 2. The absence 

 of s in all except Samoan and its direct offshoots Tokelau and 

 Ellice ; 3. The great predominance of vowels over consonants, 

 no two consonants ever combining, and no word or syllable 

 ever ending with a consonant, and hence the remark that these 

 are languages " without a backbone " ; 4. Their wonderful 

 homogeneity, far exceeding that of the Semitic and all other 

 linguistic families ; 5. The almost total absence of inflexion, 

 relations being expressed by separate particles preceding and 

 following the unmodified root ; 6. Their imperfect diff"erentia- 

 tion of the parts of speech ; 7. The curious practice of 

 "tabooing" words, such as those forming part of a chief's 

 name, either during his lifetime or after his death ; 8. Un- 

 accountable and apparently capricious interchange of conso- 

 nants, such as the universal substitution of k for t (Jcama for 

 tama, etc.) now actually going on in the Samoan group. They 

 agree with the Malayan family chiefly in the possession of a 

 common stock of roots and of certain relational elements. 

 The essential difference between the two consists in their 

 different degrees of development, the Mahori occupying an 

 intermediate position between the isolating and agglutinating, 

 the Malayan having already fully reached the agglutinating 

 state. It is also to be noticed that the literary Mahori, which 

 has grown up of late years, does not always convey a clear 

 idea of its primitive simplicity. The translators of the Bible 

 and other works, partly through necessity, partly through 

 ignorance of its real genius, have introduced a number of 

 neologisms, phrases, idioms, and even grammatical forms, 

 resulting in a new language now currently spoken, especially 

 in Tahiti, which Jules Garnier describes as "si differente de 

 I'ancienne que les vieillai-ds peuvent s'entretenir dans le 

 langage de leur jeunesse sans que leurs fils les comprennent." 

 {Odanie, p. 332.) Under such inffuences it is easy to under- 

 stand how rapidly Mahori might develop into a perfectly 

 agglutinating tongue. 



