342 JOHN FRASER. 
ON THE LANGUAGES OF OCEANTA. 
(1.) The Malayo-Polynesian Theory. 
By Joun FRASER, B.A., LL.D. 
[ Read before the Royal Society, N.S. Wales, December 7, 1892. ] 
THE employment of labour brought from the islands of the South 
Seas 1s now a political question in these colonies, and especially 
in Queensland, but to an ethnologist a more important question 
is the origin of the races to which these labouring ‘ kanakas’ be- 
long, for as yet their origin is undetermined. We have been 
accustomed to apply the name ‘kanaka’ to all those black labourers 
in the Queensland sugar plantations who have been brought from 
the New Hebrides and other adjacent islands of Melanesia, but 
the name properly belongs only to the brown inhabitants of EHast- 
ern Polynesia—all to the east and north-east of Fiji; for in their 
dialects everywhere kanaka means ‘men’ or ‘aman.’ The & of 
that word is for an original ¢, as is often the case in these dialects, 
and so the Samoan form, tangata, is nearer the root, which is éa, 
meaning ‘a man.’ From this original root derived words are | 
found in all the islands, east and west, with the meaning of ‘male,’ 
‘man,’ ‘father,’ ‘son,’ and the like. 
If a traveller leaves Singapore and journeys on towards the 
east, right across the wide Pacific, always keeping near the 
Equator, he passes in succession many groups of islands. Those 
of the East Indian Archipelago, as far as New Guinea, are occupied 
mostly by Malays; New Guinea and the islands east of it, includ- 
ing Fiji, the New Hebrides, and New Caledonia, have a blackish 
negroid population, and thus the whole are called Melanesia ; 
beyond them are the Tongan and other groups, including Hawaii — 
in the far north-east and the Maories in New Zealand; the people 
in all of these are commonly called the brown Polynesians or the 
