I must know French to approach Marquesan, because these islands are French for eighty years, and I know of no practical grammar except that of Monseigneur Dordillon, written in 1857, and of no procurable dictionary but his. Both are in French.
A tragedy originating in petty discipline or episcopal jealousy saddened the last days of the writer, Bishop Dordillon. He had created out of the mouths of his neophytes the written Marquesan tongue, and he made his dictionary his life-work. They would not let him publish it. Ecclesiastical authorities, presumably of Chile,—for all Catholic missionaries here were under that see in early days,—forbade it. After forty years of labor upon the book, he was allowed to put it to print, but not to affix his name as author. Against this prohibition the sturdy prelate set his face.
“Not for himself,” said the vicar, Père David, to me, “but for the church and our order, he would not be robbed of the honor. He died very old, and confided his manuscript to a fellow-priest. For fifty years each missionary to these islands copied it for his personal use. Ten thousand nights have thus passed because of the jealousy of some prelate in Valparaiso or in Paris. Pierre Chaulet, of our order, the Sacré Cœur, revised the book after forty-five years’ residence here.”
The Tahitian was the first Maori language reduced to writing. No Polynesian race had a written literature nor an alphabet. Writing was not invented nor thought of when they left their European home, nor did they acquire it in Malaysia. The Polynesians marked certain epochs and events by monuments, and consecrated them with ceremonies. These events also marked their language, which was peculiarly susceptible to change and addition. It was abundant, and all the details of their material life and history were impressed upon the language in shades of meanings and words. In Tahiti the finer meanings disappeared ninety years ago, and the adverbs and degrees of comparison were lost. In the Marquesas, because of the lesser infiltration of whites, the language in its purity lasted longer. One of the mutineers of the Bounty, Midshipman Peter Heywood, who chose to remain in Tahiti rather than sail with Christian, wrote the first vocabulary of Tahitian in prison at Execution Dock in England. Bligh had determined to hang Heywood, and, awaiting his seemingly assured death, the young officer in his death cell set down the words he had learned in the happy days in the Isle of Venus, with their connotation in English. One may imagine it was a sad yet consoling task to live again the scenes of his joyous exile, and that each word of Tahitian he wrote conjured for him a picture of the scene in which he had learned it, and perhaps of the soft lips that had often repeated it to him. It is pleasant to know that the youthful lexicographer did not mount the gallows, and that his vocabulary was eagerly studied by the first missionaries leaving England for the South Seas on the Duff. The first word the clerics heard when the Tahitians boarded the Duff was taio, friend, and the reverends wrote to England that as the “heathen danced on the deck in sign of hospitality and friendship, we sang them, ‘O’er the gloomy hills of darkness.’” With Heywood’s list as a preparation, they established an alphabet for Tahiti which fitted the dulcet sounds as they registered on their untuned ears. The general rule was to give the vowels their Italian value and to sound the consonants as in English. Their fonts of type were limited, and they had to use makeshifts of other letters when they ran out of the proper ones. They made monumental errors in their monumental toil, errors unavoidably due to their not being philologists, nor even well educated—errors perpetuated and incorporated in the language as finally written. This Tahitian dictionary and grammar formed the basis of all similar books in the Marquesan, Hawaiian, and other dialects. What store of ancient tongues the missionaries had, they put into linguafacturing religious words for the Tahitians. In fact, they were so busy inventing words for ordinary use, and for their prayers, sermons, and the translation of the Bible, they did not record many native words. They bowdlerized the whole Polynesian language, and emasculated an age-old tongue from which we might have gathered in its strength something of the spirit of our Aryan forefathers.
A chief difficulty of the makers of the written Polynesian languages was the adjectives. Primitive peoples have not the wealth of these that civilized nations possess, and fine shadings here are often expressed by intonation, grimace, or gesture.
There is no available Tahitian-English lexicon. The London Missionary Society published one before the French seized Tahiti in the forties. It is out of print, and as obsolete as to present-day Tahitian as Dr. Johnson’s once-famous tome is as to English. The only copies are in the hands of the Mormon, Josephite and other English-speaking missionaries in Tahiti, and in the libraries of collectors. It cannot be bought in Tahiti. Monseigneur Tepano Jaussen wrote one in French. I have it, dated at Paris, 1898; but so fast is the Tahitian tongue degrading into a bloodless wretched jumble that it, too, is almost archaic.
“A Vocabulary of the Nukahiwa Language; including a Nukahiwa-English Vocabulary and an English-Nukahiwa Vocabulary” was printed in Boston in 1848. No living Nukahiwan, or Marquesan, would understand much of it, as there has been such radical change and degeneracy in the dialect in the seventy years since it was written, and so few Marquesans survive.
The language shows that at one time they did not count beyond four, and the higher numbers were expressed by multiples of four. Afterward they came to five, which they made lima or the fingers of one hand. When the ten or denary system was adopted, the word umi, or whiskers, was chosen to mean ten, or a multitude.
The cardinal numbers are sometimes tiresome. For instance, thirty-one is E tahi tekau me te onohuu me te mea ke e tahi. I once remarked to a Marquesan chief that the Marquesan people said many words to mean a trifle and took a long time to eat their food.
“What else have we to do?” he asked me.