496 
COMPENDIUM OF GEOGRAPHY AND TRAVEL 
race, as it is termed by Mr. Kanken, have been described 
by Professor A. H. Keane. Those most remarkable are, 
he says, as follows :— 
1. Their limited phonetic system, consisting of fifteen 
letters only, five vowels and ten consonants; 2. The absence 
of s in all except Samoan and its direct offshoots Tokelau and 
Ellice ; 3. The great predominance of vowels over consonants, 
no two consonants ever combining, and no word or syllable 
ever ending with a consonant, and hence the remark that these 
are languages “ without a backbone ”; 4. Their wonderful 
homogeneity, far exceeding that of the Semitic and all other 
linguistic families; 5. The almost total absence of inflexion, 
relations being expressed by separate particles preceding and 
following the unmodified root; 6. Their imperfect differentia¬ 
tion of the parts of speech; 7. The curious practice of 
“ tabooing ” words, such as those forming part of a chiefs 
name, either during his lifetime or after his death; 8. Un¬ 
accountable and apparently capricious interchange of conso¬ 
nants, such as the universal substitution of h for t (Jcama for 
tama , etc.) now actually going on in the Samoan group. They 
agree with the Malayan family chiefly in the possession of a 
common stock of roots and of certain relational elements. 
The essential difference between the two consists in their 
different degrees of development, the Mahori occupying an 
intermediate position between the isolating and agglutinating, 
the Malayan having already fully reached the agglutinating 
state. It is also to be noticed that the literary Mahori, which 
has grown up of late years, does not always convey a clear 
idea of its primitive simplicity. The translators of the Bible 
and other works, partly through necessity, partly through 
ignorance of its real genius, have introduced a number of 
neologisms, phrases, idioms, and even grammatical forms, 
resulting in a new language now currently spoken, especially 
in Tahiti, which Jules Garnier describes as “si differente de 
l’ancienne que les vieillards peuvent s’entretenir dans le 
langage de leur jeunesse sans que leurs fils les comprennent.” 
(Odanie, p. 332.) Under such influences it is easy to under¬ 
stand how rapidly Mahori might develop into a perfectly 
agglutinating tongue. 
