The Languages of the Pacific. 21 
suffice, kapo, to snatch, and apo, to grasp; kita, tight, fast, and ‘ta, 
tight, fast; and koti, to cut, and oft, finish. 
Fornander points out how some, if not all of these, are paralleled 
in the Indo-European languages. ‘The substitution of s in Samoan 
for the h of the other dialects occurs also in Sanskrit, Latin, Gothic, 
Iranian, Greek and Cymric. The change of ng of Samoan, Maori 
and other southern dialects into 1 in Tahitian and Hawaiian has its 
parallel in the substitution of m in Slavonic for the ng of Sanskrit, 
Zend, Latin and other European tongues. The r was interchange- 
able with / in Indo-European as in Polynesian, and both were often 
changed into d in both linguistic spheres. It is not infrequent to 
find roots in both spheres that have forms with and without the 
r or 1, with and without the k, and with ¢ for k. Further I have 
found in my analysis of Polynesian roots and words that m and t 
are moveable prefixes like h, e.g. moti, finished, and oti, finished ; 
manumanu, rotten, and anuanu, disgusting; tua, the back, and wa, 
the backbone ; toretore, to split into strips, and hore, to split off; tu, 
to be strong, to stand, and w, to be firm; tu/, to tattoo, and whi, the 
puncturing instrument. This occurs also in Indo-European roots. 
In fact, as Fornander points out, the primitive Aryan language must 
have had exactly the same range of consonants as Polynesian and 
though the process was not carried so widely among the vowels, 
the decadence and interchange of consonants had begun. ‘The home- 
land of the primeval Aryan is now accepted as in Europe between 
the Baltic and the Black Sea, and that was a cold region in which 
the organs of speech were capable of different consonantal sounds ; 
whilst the environment of Polynesian after it reached the Pacific 
was tropical and exactly suited to the decay of the consonants. 
But the vowels in Polynesian, though not so unstable as the 
consonants still tend to interchange mutually, especially in the un- 
accented syllable. A few instances will suffce; keo, or kea, white; 
imu, umu and oma, oven (here 10 =u and u— a); tohunga in 
Maori, kahuna in Hawaiian and tufunga in Tongan and Samoan; 
Hawaiian anoni and anune, to mix up; Hawaiian api, the beating 
of the pulse, and Maori kakapa, to throb; Hawaiian weo and wea, 
red; Hawaiian eulu, a branch cut off to be planted again, Maori huri, 
a sprout, and Hawaiian /uli, kalo tops for planting; Hawaiian 10, 
to flee from fear, and Maori thi, to shudder. So the double vowel 
[9] 
