18 BEACH-LA-MAR. 
Be that as it may, it really is safe to say that all of the hundred 
known languages of Melanesia are on practically the same plane of 
development, even as those who speak them vary in but few particu- 
lars little above or little below the same cultural horizon. With this 
note we shall feel at liberty to employ for the purposes of this study 
the convenience of such a designation as Melanesian speech, a com- 
posite of our knowledge of many languages within that region used 
as a bench-mark for the examination of this jargon. 
We have discarded Bopp’s erroneous classification, erected on quite 
insufficient data, parroted by a long line of systematic philologists, 
the Malayo-Polynesian speech family. Briefly stated, he sought to 
set forth that from Madagascar to Easter Island there was a single 
family of languages and that it was agglutinative. Although first 
combated by Crawfurd in 1847, this theory has been a stumbling- 
block to hinder the progress of the study of linguistics in the Pacific 
tract, thus in a great measure succeeding in preventing the forging 
of the weapon which might destroy it. Now, however, we recognize 
the falsity of the classification, and Polynesian and Melanesian may 
go ahead in search of their appointed end. We know that these two 
groups of languages are not agglutinative. 
They are isolating. Formative elements have lately begun to 
attach themselves to primal root or stem forms, yet they are far 
from so much as the beginning of that alteration in sense or in form 
or in both which characterizes the quasi terminations or infixations 
of the agglutinative languages. Vocables are frequently monosyl- 
labic; more commonly they are in pairs of syllables; there is no 
objection to stately polysyllables. It is not difficult to separate 
these words into monosyllabic elements; the reduction is so suc- 
cessfully accomplished in such a great number of instances that when 
the reduction seems to fail we may properly ascribe such failure to 
the lack of data rather than to any fault of method or defect of 
principle. We go even beyond this reduction to monosyllables. 
There is excellent reason—in many cases it is clearly demonstrable— 
to believe that the seemingly ultimate monosyllable is susceptible of 
reduction to the primal seed of the language in a vowel, to which may 
be prefixed or may be suffixed, or both, certain modulant consonants 
having definite coefficient value; that is to say, the consonantal 
modulants tend to qualify, to define, to refract, and to focus some 
particular sense in which the primordial seed vowel may be applied 
for the communication of ideas.* 
In a certain distinctive word-form the Melanesian languages 
exhibit wide variety. In the softly flowing languages of Polynesia 
the rule is absolute that all syllables must be open; every word must 
therefore end in a vowel; two consonants may never under any cir- 


*American Journal of Philology, XXVII, 369. 
