The children of this age already show a very curious example of a phonetic self-consciousness in which they are almost as acute and discriminating as their elders. When the missionaries reduced the language to writing, there was no k in the language, the k positions in other Polynesian dialects being filled in Samoan either with a t or a glottal stop. Soon after the printing of the Bible, and the standardisation of Samoan spelling, greater contact with Tonga introduced the k into the spoken language of Savai’i and Upolu, displacing the t, but not replacing the glottal stop. Slowly this intrusive usage spread eastward over Samoa, the missionaries who controlled the schools and the printing press fighting a dogged and losing battle with the less musical k. To-day the t is the sound used in the speech of the educated and in the church, still conventionally retained in all spelling and used in speeches and on occasions demanding formality. The Manu’a children who had never been to the missionary boarding schools, used the k entirely. But they had heard the t in church and at school and were sufficiently conscious of the difference to rebuke me immediately if I slipped into the colloquial k, which was their only speech habit, uttering the t sound for perhaps the first time in their lives to illustrate the correct pronunciation from which I, who was ostensibly learning to speak correctly, must not deviate. Such an ability to disassociate the sound used from the sound heard is remarkable in such very young children and indeed remarkable in any person who is not linguistically sophisticated.
CHAPTER XI
Pages 161 to 163.
During six months I saw six girls leave the pastor’s establishment for several reasons: Tasi, because her mother was ill and she, that rare phenomenon, the eldest in a biological household, was needed at home; Tua, because she had come out lowest in the missionaries’ annual examination which her mother attributed to favouritism on the part of the pastor; Luna, because her stepmother, whom she disliked, left her father and thus made her home more attractive and because under the influence of a promiscuous older cousin she began to tire of the society of younger girls and take an interest in love affairs; Lita, because her father ordered her home, because with the permission of the pastor, but without consulting her family, she went off for a three weeks’ visit in another island. Going home for Lita involved residence in the far end of the other village, necessitating a complete change of friends. The novelty of the new group and new interests kept her from in any way chafing at the change. Sala, a stupid idle girl, had eloped from the household of the pastor.
APPENDIX II
METHODOLOGY OF THIS STUDY
It is impossible to present a single and unified picture of the adolescent girl in Samoa and at the same time to answer most satisfactorily the various kinds of questions which such a study will be expected to answer. For the ethnologist in search of data upon the usages and rites connected with adolescence it is necessary to include descriptions of customs which have fallen into partial decay under the impact of western propaganda and foreign example. Traditional observances and attitudes are also important in the study of the adolescent girl in present-day Samoa because they still form a large part of the thought pattern of her parents, even if they are no longer given concrete expression in the girl’s cultural life. But this double necessity of describing not only the present environment and the girl’s reaction to it, but also of interpolating occasionally some description of the more rigid cultural milieu of her mother’s girlhood, mars to some extent the unity of the study.
The detailed observations were all made upon a group of girls living in three practically contiguous villages on one coast of the island of Taū. The data upon the ceremonial usages surrounding birth, adolescence and marriage were gathered from all of the seven villages in the Manu’a Archipelago.
The method of approach is based upon the assumption that a detailed intensive investigation will be of more value than a more diffused and general study based upon a less accurate knowledge of a greater number of individuals. Dr. Van Waters’ study of The Adolescent Girl Among Primitive Peoples has exhausted the possibilities of an investigation based upon the merely external observations of the ethnologist who is giving a standardised description of a primitive culture. We have a huge mass of general descriptive material without the detailed observations and the individual cases in the light of which it would be possible to interpret it.
The writer therefore chose to work in one small locality, in a group numbering only six hundred people, and spend six months accumulating an intimate and detailed knowledge of all the adolescent girls in this community. As there were only sixty-eight girls between the ages of nine and twenty, quantitative statements are practically valueless for obvious reasons: the probable error of the group is too large; the age classes are too small, etc. The only point at which quantitative statements can have any relevance is in regard to the variability within the group, as the smaller the variability within the sample, the greater the general validity of the results.