18 The Languages of the Pacihc. 
It therefore there is a difference between the Polynesian phonology 
and that of those to the west of it we may assume that it was a 
change of mothers that caused it; for right through the seven 
thousand miles from Tonga to the coast of India the climatic 
environment is practically the same, moist heat governed by regular- 
ly blowing winds. 
Now the phonology of the Polynesian dialects differs by a’ 
whole world from that of all the languages to the west of it. The 
former have only twelve to fifteen sounds, the five vowels and seven 
to ten consonants, the most primitive outfit that any language in 
the world has. As soon as you step out of Polynesia westward, 
say from Tonga to the neighboring Fiji, the language has from 
twenty to thirty sounds, and this holds right to the coast of India 
and all through India. Further, there are sounds to these languages 
to the west that no Polynesian could by any training be made capable 
of pronouncing, nay that no European could, i.e. the speech organs 
are absolutely different in the two regions. One instance is the 
q 
Polynesian phonologically from all to the west 1s that it must close 
kpw of Melanesia. But the fundamental principle that divides 
a syllable or a word with a vowel, and it cannot pronounce twa 
consonants together. All the languages to the west can not only 
close a word with a consonant, but many of them (including Malay ) 
prefer to do so. The only two languages in the Pacific Ocean that 
have the same phonological laws are Japanese, away to the north- 
west, and Quichua, away to the southeast; but the former is 
grammatically of a different type, the agglutinative, and the latter, 
though almost grammarless, like Polynesian, has inflections only in 
the pronouns, including the strange Polynesian characteristic of a 
different form in the first person for the plural that includes those 
spoken to and the plural that excludes those spoken to. I have found 
but a small percentage of Quichua words or roots the same as in 
Polynesjan, while the range of sounds in Japanese is nearly the same 
as in Polynesian. 
There is one other characteristic of Polynesian phonology that 
almost puts out of court the accepted theory that the Polynesian 
languages came from India or the Malay archipelago. They are 
divided into / languages and r languages. In Polynesia / has a 
little of the trill of the r and the r has somewhat of the liquidity of 
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