A fantastic but dying language—The Polynesian or Maori Tongue—Making of the first lexicons—Words taken from other languages—Decay of vocabularies with decrease of population—Humors and whimsicalities of the dictionary as arranged by foreigners.
MALICIOUS Gossip and Le Brunnec taught me Marquesan in the “man-eating isle of Hiva-Oa,” as Stevenson termed my home. After supper or dinner I had a lesson in my paepae; often in a mixed group, for the beginnings of democracy are in the needs of company. Here were the governor, the highest official, an army officer and surgeon; Le Brunnec, a small trader; Kekela, a Hawaiian; Puhe, the hunchback servant of Bapp, the trader; Exploding Eggs, Ghost Girl, and Malicious Gossip and her husband, Mouth of God. The governor spoke French and a very little English, Le Brunnec those and Marquesan, Mouth of God and his wife Marquesan and a trifle of French, Kekela Marquesan and English, and the hunchback Marquesan only. Ghost Girl, of course, knew only that, but she never spoke at all except to beg for rum or tobacco. Lonesomeness made us intimate despite our difference of origin, status and language. We talked about the Marquesan language, and we two comparative new-comers strove to enlarge our vocabulary.
The derivation of words is an absorbing pursuit. Enwrapped in it are history and romance, the advance from the primitive, the gradual march of civilization, and, besides, many a good laugh; for man made merry as he came up, and the chatterings of the missing links are often heard in the chase through the buried centuries for the beginnings of language. The Aryan, English’s ancestor, was originally made up of a single consonant between two vowels, and I fancied I was speaking my ancestral words in this aboriginal tongue.
“There is nothing more fascinating than etymologies. To the uninitiated the victim seems to have eaten of ‘insane roots that take the reason prisoner’; while the illuminate too often looks upon the stems and flowers of language, the highest achievements of thought and poesy, as mere handles by which to pull up the grim tubers that lie at the base of articulate expression, sacred knobs of speech, sacred to him as the potato to the Irishman.” James Russell Lowell had himself eaten of that maddening weed. These Marquesan verbal radicals engaged me both by their interest and their humor.
The erudite philologist may harken back to the Chaldaic or another dead language of Asia or Africa and make ponderous tomes upon his research, but the amateur can dig as he plays only by being actually with a simple, semi-savage people, as I was, and finding among them, still active, the base and slight growth of human thought and emotion in speech. The most alluring tongue in sound and origin is the Maori, and Marquesan is Maori. It is spoken from Hawaii to New Zealand, and is termed the “grand Polynesian” language. The people of those two groups of islands, as well as those of the Marquesan, Society, Friendly, Paumotuan, Samoan, Tongan, and some other small archipelagos, have it as their vernacular, though its variations are so great as to prevent converse except limitedly between the different islands. The Maori tongue is as full of melancholy as are those passing races. Soon it will be lost to use, like the ancient Greek or the mellifluous idiom of the cultivated Incas. It is decaying so fast now that a few years mark a decided loss of words, and lessen the adherence to any standard. Yet it is the most charming of all present expressions of thought or emotion, and it is a great pity that it perishes. One sighs for a South Seas Sinn Fein to revivify it.
The Polynesians, as scientists call them, know themselves, and therefore their tongue as Maori. And just as “British” to an Englishman is a word of pride, and “American” to our patriotic schoolboys and orators the greatest word ever coined, so “Maori” actually means first-class, excellent, fine. The Maoris were hundred per centers before the Chosen People.
I have lived much with Maori folk in many archipelagos and listened for years to their soft and simple, sweet and short words. Their speech is like the rippling of gentle waters, the breezes through the breadfruit-trees. It has color and rhythm and a euphonism unequalled. Language begins as poetry and ends as algebra, but here the algebraic stage was not reached, and there remained something of the unconscious uprush of its beginning, and the subliminal laws of mind which shaped its construction. For the Maori is a very old language, older than Greek or Latin, and was cut off from other languages at the outset of culture, before the mud of the Tigris was made into pots. The Marquesan indigene was never so complex, as in acute civilization, that his language could not tell what he thought and felt, though he, too, had art to supplement words, as his tattooing, carving, houses, and temples prove.
The Maori has one inflexible rule, that no word shall end in a consonant, that no two consonants shall be together, and that all letters in a word be sounded.
There are only fifteen letters, or sounds, in the pure alphabet, b, c, d, j, h, l, q, s, w, x, and y being unknown. In some dialects other letters have been introduced in the adaptation of foreign words. They are not, however, properly Polynesian. Words are usually unchangeable, but pronouns and the auxiliary verb “to be” and many adjectives and verbs have curious doubling quality, like ino iino; horo, hohoro, horohoro; haere, hahaere. Ii in Marquesan means “anger”; iiii means “red in the face from anger.” The adjective follows the noun, as in moa iti, little chicken, iti is the adjective. The subject comes after the verb “to be,” expressed or understood, or after the verb that denotes the action of the subject.
The Maoris knew no genders except those for beings by nature male or female, and these they indicate by following words. In Tahitian, tane means “man,” and vahine “woman,” or “male and female.” Thus I was called often O’Brien tane, and, where the same proper names are applied to men and women, the word tane or vahine indicates the sex: The sign of a well-known merchant in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti and the entrepôt of the South Seas reads, “Tane Meuel,” the Tane being the name his proud parents gave him when born to show their delight at his being a boy.