The Oceanic Languages Shemitic : a Discovery. 245 



are a good many monosyllabic words ; . . . the great 

 majority of radical words are bisyllables." This is true of 

 Oceanic universally, whose radical words, as Whitney says, 

 * are prevailingly dissyllabic ;" and it is true, also, in like 

 manner of Shemitic. 



As was to be expected, there is no Oceanic language that 

 has retained all the Shemitic consonants ; the Malagasy has 

 perhaps retained more than any other. There is much less 

 difference between the Malagasy and Hebrew or Arabic 

 than there is between the Polynesian and Malay or Malagasy. 

 For, as Crawford remarks, "the dialect of the Sandwich 

 Islands wants no fewer than thirteen, that of the Marquesas 

 twelve, and that of New Zealand eleven consonants of the 

 Malayan system." As used here, the vowels have the 

 continental sound ; and it has to be borne in mind that the 

 short sounds of i and e are almost identical, and somewhat 

 like that of short u or y. As in Shemitic so in Oceanic, 

 vowel sounds are peculiarly interchangeable. In what 

 follows the consonants have the English powers. The 

 Shemitic words are transliterated as nearly as possible, 

 according to the system of Gesenius, set forth in the com- 

 parative table of alphabets prefixed both to his grammar 

 and dictionary. Cheth is hh or ch ; in Efatese, as there is no 

 h or ch, cheth is either k or quiescent. Efatese has but 

 the one sibilant, s, that can represent the Shemitic 

 z, sh, and s. Tzade or tz can only be t or s as pronounced 

 by an Efatese native ; koph (q), k, and g can only be k ; 

 and d, t, and th can only be t. In Efatese k and ng are 

 very frequently interchanged, and in the vast majority of 

 instances ng is merely dialectic for k ; p (or b) and v (or f) 

 are frequently interchanged for the sake of euphony. What 

 may be called double euphonic consonants are somewhat 

 common in Oceanic, as mb or mp for b or p, and tr or nr 

 for r. In Oceanic the vowel at the end of a word is often 

 euphonic. The same rules for the commutation and omission 

 of letters apply as well to the Oceanic as to the Shemitic. 

 As in Assyrian (Sayce and Norris) so in Oceanic, ayin is a 

 vowel or quiescent, and is here denoted by a comma, thus (,). 

 In what follows when the third person singular preterite of 

 a Shemitic verb is given with certain of its letters italicised 

 the letters not italicised are the radicals of the " stem-word." 



Dr. Thomas Young " has calculated by the theory of 

 probabilities that if three words were identical in two 



