on 
The Languages of the Pacific. 2 
think, at least thirty per cent of such, but this is no proof of any 
alien infiltration, but only of migrations from the sinking fatherland 
Hawaiki, to the group, separated by so long intervals of time as to 
allow of the disuse of one set of words in the mother tongue and the 
loss of another set in the new land. For they have all the same 
phonology, figurative application and transparency of composition 
that distinguish all the Polynesian dialects. 
The languages of Melanesia and coastal Papua, away to the west 
of Polynesia, have only a small percentage of their vocabularies in 
any way to be identified with Polynesian words, and as a rule these 
are greatly mutilated and often difficult to recognize. I gave some 
few words in my previous lecture, which going right through to the 
Malay archipelago yet found their derivation only in Polynesian; 
as e.g. bia or pia the sago tree, but in Polynesian “exudation” from 
pi which is used in that language in the sense of “ to exude.” I will 
add one more; the Polynesian wahine, a woman, comes from wa == 
“set apart” and hine, “a girl,” but it goes away west into Indonesia 
in many different forms as e. g. fafen, vaine, aine, babineh. I could 
easily give scores of others. I doubt greatly if the implication in the 
term “Malayo-Polynesian” that these languages are all akin is 
correct. For though they are to some extent grammarless like 
Polynesian, they have much more formal grammar than Polynesian. 
In the Melanesian and coastal Papuan and to a small extent in the 
Micronesian and Indonesian languages there is a shorter form of the 
personal pronoun used as an affix to the noun. These are so much 
more primitive in their linguistic and intellectual development that 
they cannot think of a thing but as belonging to some personality ; 
it is always mine or yours or his. The Polynesians have no mental 
primitiveness of this kind, they can think of a thing in itself and 
apart from its possession by a person. So in the Polynesian dialects 
(chiefly in Hawaiian) there is only a trace of a grammatical habit 
that is found largely in the Indonesian languages and is almost 
universal in the languages between Polynesia and the Malay archi- 
pelago. They cannot use the numerals except with classifying 
particles; flat things have one special particle to themselves when 
being counted, and round things another and so on. A third 
characteristic of those languages to the west is the use of an infix, 
i.e. the insertion of a significant syllable right into the heart of a 
[13] 
