POLYNESIAN AND MALAYAN. 173 
the Malagasy of Madagascar, the Punans, Klemantans, and Kayans 
of North Borneo, the several tribes of the Philippines, and why, in 
conjunction with the most archaic Malay, we find equally the purest 
preservation of the Polynesian. 
In thus sundering the Polynesian from the Malayan, in establishing 
the fact that they represent two families of speech of different grades of 
development and not a single one, we shall work no harm to the science 
of language. On the contrary the result should be most highly bene- 
ficial, for it is always a relief to be rid of superstition and obsession in 
any relation of life. Set free from its impossible association with the 
ageliutinative Malayan, the isolating Polynesian will stand forth as the 
fit road along which investigation may trace its steps to a genesis of the 
speech of man. ‘The ultimate attainment of research into the modern 
languages of the analytic type is to establish their groundwork in the 
inflected tongues. ‘The last point which the student of the languages 
of inflection may attain is to connect them with yet earlier agglutinative 
speech. So, too, with the student of agglutination, his analysis carries 
him back to the yet simpler speech of isolation. 
In like manner, in like measure, the investigator who begins on 
this bottom level, makes his start in a family of isolating language— 
what may he hope to reach? Early in his course he will reach mono- 
syllabism, a term frequently but erroneously applied to isolating speech. 
After the monosyllable what is there? ‘There is the vowel, and this is 
in the speech of man because he is an animal and the unmixed vowel 
is the whole speech of the beast. There is the consonant modulant 
Whereby man is learning to adapt animal speech to needs which the 
beast can not feel. It is there that speech begins. Only set the Poly- 
nesian speech free from the hindrance and the misleading of the 
Malayan association, and the students of speech may press bravely 
on to the discovery of the beginning of man speech. 
I regard myself as singularly fortunate, I consider it a great factor in 
the awakening of interest in the themes to which these studies of the Pacific 
and Indian seas may lead, that there is an interlacing of the work of Captain 
Friederici with my own. In this work I have made grateful use of his material 
as enriching the phonetic studies presented in this chapter. Later in the serial 
course of these studies I shall be under a great debt to him for clearing the 
way in his brilliant research into the grammar of Melanesian speech. In 
my volume The Polynesian Wanderings I was led to propose a second migra- 
tion track of Polynesian migrants through Torres Straits. Just before this 
chapter leaves my hand I am fortunately in receipt of his comment upon the 
Viti Stream which I have proposed. It is published at page 16 of his third 
volume, Untersuchungen tiber eine melanesische Wanderstrasse (1913). 
“Nachdem somit in grossen Ziigen die ethnologischen und linguistischen Verhaltnisse 
der vier Vélkergruppen tiberschaut worden sind, die durch die folgende Untersuchung 
miteinander verbunden werden sollen, bleibt mir noch iibrig, kurz den Stand der Auffas- 
sungen zu skizzieren, der zur Zeit des Erscheinens von Teil II dieser Veréffentlichung, also 
im Marz 1912, von den Ethnologen und Linguisten in dieser Frage eingenommen wurde. 
