Atolls of the Sun

by Frederick O'Brien

While there is a dispute over the origin of the Maori, my friend, McMillan Brown of New Zealand, a supreme authority, believes it separated from the primeval Aryan a millennium or two ago, in the stone age, and came into the Pacific with the migration that first brought women into these waters. Some scholars say the language is to be classed with the modern European tongues, and especially with English. They cite the reduction of inflection to a minimum, the expression of the grammatical relationship of words by their order in the sentence, the use of auxiliaries and participles, the power of interchanging the significant parts of speech as occasion requires; the indication of the number of nouns by articles or other definitives, cases by prepositions, gender by the addition of the word for male or female, the degree of adjectives by a separate word, and the mood and tense of verbs by a participle.

As English spoken in isolated mountain regions—among the poor whites of the Middle West and South of the United States—becomes attenuated and broken, so in many of these islands and archipelagos the Maori language became differentiated by climate and environment, and shriveled by the limitations of its use. The Marquesan has been weakened by phonetic decay, the l and r almost disappearing, and in some places, too, the k being hardly ever heard.

The author with his friends at council

As a nation perishes, so does its language. As its numbers decrease, the vocabulary of the survivors shrinks. It does not merely cease to grow; it lessens. Cornwall proved that and Wales; Ireland and Scotland exemplify it now. A language waxes with the mass and activities of its speakers. Scholars may preserve a grammar, as the school Latin, or as the Sinn Fein is doing in Ireland, but the body and blood of the vulgate speech waste and ebb without the pulse of growth. Speech fattens with usage. The largest number of words in any language is found in that language which most people speak. The most enterprising race spreads its language farthest by religion, commerce, and conquest.

Photo from L. Gauthier
House of governor of Paumotu Islands. Atoll of Fakarava

All these Polynesian tongues are dying with the people. Corrupted first by the admixture of European words, their glossaries written by men unborn to the land, the racial interests that fed them killed by the destruction of customs and ambitions, these languages are moribund, and as unlike those spoken before the white came as is the bison to the family cow.

The French observer Bovis said seventy years ago that only a few Tahitians understood and spoke pure Tahitian. No one does now. Yet, obsolescent and garbled as are these spiritual victims of pale-face domination, the South Sea folk cling to them affectionately. I attended the first sessions of the Hawaiian legislature under American territorial government. All proceedings were in both English and Hawaiian, many of the legislators not understanding English after eighty years of intimate relations with England and America. They, like the other Maoris, had not learned other tongues, but had let their own lapse into a bastard patois.

The Hawaiian is akin to the Marquesan. The variations consist in not using in one dialect words in use in another, in the sense attached to the same words, in the changing of vowels and of consonants in the same words, and also by the replacement of consonants by a click of the tongue. Almost all dialects have these unuttered consonants expressed by the guttural accentuation of the vowel following.