24 The Languages of the Pacific. 
times as many words with a as the vowel as those with any one of 
the other four vowels, e, 7, 0, u. From a in both languages there 
are two series of mutations e and 7 on the one hand and o and wv 
on the other. If you look into Fick’s Indo-European dictionary, 
you will find ten times more roots with a as the vowel than those 
that have e or 1, 0 or u. And as far as I can judge by analysis of 
the roots of more than one syllable or two letters, they are all 
reducible to roots of one or two sounds, a pure vowel or a consonant 
and a vowel. In other words primeval Indo-European had the same 
sound law as Polynesian, i. e. it preferred to close a syllable or word 
with a vowel. 
There is one other point that the discovery of Tocharish settles, 
it is that the western European type of language came east into 
Asia. Aryan languages are divided into two sections by a line drawn 
from the Baltic to the Black Sea. West of that all the languages 
retain the original k sound. East of it all reduce it to a sibilant, at 
least all till Tocharish was discovered. The former are called by 
philologists the centwm languages from the Latin word for one hun- 
dred; the latter the Sato languages from the Sanskrit word for one 
hundred. ‘Tocharish retains the k unchanged to s, and must there- 
fore have come east long before Sanskrit hived off and traveled into 
Asia. Polynesian also retains the k unchanged into s, and it too 
with the same sound-range as Tocharish and the primeval Aryan 
languages must have traveled from Europe west of the line between 
the Baltic and the Black Sea through Asia, long before Sanskrit 
began its long migration into India or even began its elaborate 
inflectional system. That inflectional system had begun before it 
completely separated from its cousins; for many of its inflections 
have close kinship with those of Greek, Latin and the Teutonic 
languages. Even Polynesian, which shows an extremely primitive 
beginning of inflections in the personal pronouns (the dual in ua 
and the plural in ow), must have hived off and gone east before the 
inflectionalism had developed to any great extent. There could have 
been little or no formal grammar, as we can see in Tocharish; the 
same word could be used as noun, adjective, adverb or verb; and 
particles supplied the cement or binding element of the sentence. 
Of course every dialect of Polynesia has a large percentage 
of its words and roots peculiar to itself; Hawaiian has, I should 
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