CHAPTER IV, 
POLYNESIAN AND MALAYAN. 
We are now brought to that division of the theme whose particular 
interest I freely confess was most largely operative in inducing me to 
accept the not inconsiderable task of preparing this Subanu material 
for publication. Indeed it is a great pleasure to be intimately asso- 
ciated with the introduction to scientific philology of a speech hitherto 
unrecorded, to array its vocables and the machinery of their sense- 
differentiation in such order as to facilitate the work of other students. 
It has been a rare delight and I would not seem to suggest anything 
which might in any way belittle the importance of such work. Yet 
I recognized in this employment the opportunity to make a fresh ap- 
proach upon the problem of the Malayo-Polynesian as a speech family; 
upon this base of absolutely new material to recompute the particular 
element upon which that family has been erected; from the Malayan 
side, as already I have done from the Polynesian side, to seek to render 
the family into its units. 
I consider that the unquestioning acceptance of this Malayo-Poly- 
nesian family has operated to prevent inquiry into the most promising 
source of linguistic knowledge. I believe the Malayo-Polynesian family 
to rest upon wholly false grounds. I know there is not, there can not be, 
a family of speech which shall include the Malayan with the Polynesian. 
Therefore I shall assemble the data which the Subanu and its 
kindred Visayan provide and shall let them prove these contentions. 
No material could be better for the purpose, for it is acknowledged by 
all authorities upon the Indonesian that the Philippine Malay pre- 
serves the most pure and uncontaminated type of the speech which 
holds throughout the Malay Sea. 
In the whole of the vast Malayo-Polynesian domain, extending from 
Madagascar to the Sandwich Islands in one direction, and in another to New 
Zealand, passing by the Sunda Islands, a common speech reigns, of which the 
groups and subgroups not only belong to the same class, but possess the ele- 
ments of the same vocabulary. 
Thus André Lefévre, at the beginning of the fourth chapter of his 
“Race and Language,’ and at the end of the chapter: 
The Malay family of languages is one of the simplest and most convenient 
of the agglutinative idioms, as it is the most extensive and the most clearly 
defined ; it constitutes a perfectly independent group, or at least its relationship 
to any other has not been discovered. ; 
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