The Languages of the Pacitic. 19 
of the / so that it is easy for one to pass into the other. But the 
southern groups have a preference for the r sound, so that the 
missionaries have always written this consonant in their language 
as r, whilst the northern have a preference for the /] sound; these 
are Tonga, Samoa, Futuna, Tokelau and Hawaii; all the rest except 
Marquesas use r; that group has a rule neither r nor J. If we 
step out of Polynesia and go west, every language uses both r and /. 
I should like to have explained to me how, if the Polynesian 
languages came east into the central and eastern Pacific, they were 
able to divide off the / speakers and the 7 speakers after coming 
through seven thousand miles of languages that used both r and /. 
Undoubtedly in the now submerged fatherland, Hawaiki, probably 
lying well to the south of the equator and to the east of Samoa and 
Tonga and the Tokelau group, the peoples in the north and north- 
west of it preferred the /, those in the south and southeast preferred 
the r; though the preference had not grown as pronounced as it is 
now, it had been made perhaps through that contradictoriness which 
dictates the fashions of neighbors, probably more pronounced because 
the northern tribes were nearer the equator and preferred the 
sound that needed less tensity and energy in the organs of speech 
That Hawaiki was to the east of Samoa and Tonga is evident in 
the fact that the spirit land of the two groups is not Hawaiki, but 
Bulotu, which is probably from the Fijian bulubulu, the grave, and 
bulu, the abode of departed spirits, modified by the Polynesian 
purotu, pure, pleasant, agreeable, soft, delicate, beautiful. Burotu 
is in Fiji the residence of the gods and the place of spirits; so it is 
in Samoa and Tonga. Next to the northern tribes of Hawaiki must 
have lived the Tahitians, for they, like the Samoans and Hawaiians, 
eliminated the guttural k that had come with the primeval Polynes- 
ians from the colder north and continued in all the languages that, 
like those of Tonga, the Maoris, the Paumotus and the Austral 
Islands, Mangareva and Easter Island, drifted further south into -a 
colder zone. But, to show the influence of climate on the organs of 
speech, the Hawatians, when they got up to the borders of the 
temperate zone, though they did not restore the primeval k, began to 
substitute for it the ¢ of all the other Polynesian dialects. The 
Marquesans had already begun on Hawaiki to avoid the rolling r 
and the liquid / and when they reached the steep-to islands in which 
[7] 
