The prayers of the Hawaiian priests, offered in the temples (heiau) as well as those offered at private sacred places or in family worship, invariably closed with the ejaculation amama, equivalent to Amen. In Hawaiian amama, as a verb, means “to offer in sacrifice.” This word does not occur in any of the other Polynesian dialects that I am acquainted with. It is found then alone as a sacerdotal expression that may have become obsolete or superseded in the other dialects. It has no etymon or material foundation within the Polynesian language, and I therefore consider it to be a foreign word imported into the language in far remote times and from a people of superior culture, with whom the Polynesians at one time were conterminous or, in some now unknown way, were connected. That people I believe to have been the old Accadian Cushites. Fr. Lenormant, in his “La langue primitive de la Chaldee” (Paris, 1875) pp. 126 and 271, gives the Accadian kakama as a participle of the verb kaka, “confirmer une parole,” and substantially “confirmation,” “confirme.” As a foreign word kakama was subject to more or less corruption when passing into the Polynesian language, and those acquainted with the facility and frequency with which gutturals are elided in the Hawaiian, Samoan and some other branches of Polynesian, would easily recognize the Accadian kakama in the Hawaiian amama. To the Accadians kakama was a regular participle of the verb kaka, meaning “it is confirmed,” and as such was employed at the close of a prayer or hymn. To the Polynesian (Hawaiian) it was a formula, an ejaculation, employed on similar occasions in imitation of his teachers, but without any inherent sense derived from his own language, as multitudes of Christians today use the word amen without knowing its origin or sense. That the Hawaiians employed amama as a verb, “to offer in sacrifice,” I look upon as a later adaption when the primary sense of the word, if ever known, had been forgotten. [[341]]
[1] “Chaldean Magic, its Origin and Development, by Fr. Lenormant,” London, Bagslor & Sons, p. 13. [↑]
Philological and Miscellaneous Notes.
It is evident from the language that iron, or perhaps metal of some sort, was not unknown to the Polynesians. The Hawaiians had an ancient, now obsolete, word for iron which was meki; the present term hao is comparatively modern and means any hard substance and, conventionally, iron. But meki is one of those words of wide spread connections which prove its antiquity. We are justified from the facts in assuming that in naming and defining the various phenomena of nature, mankind proceeded from generalizations to specifications or, in other words, it gave a general name to substances of the same nature before it distinguished the differences between those substances by particular names. Thus all metals probably received one or more generic names before their differences were noted by specific individual names. Thus with colors; thus with animals; thus with the body or the most prominent parts of the body; thus with trees and fruits, etc. Thus language grew from abstract to concrete terms, and as the primordial races dispersed in tribes and families they carried with them these generic terms, subject to dialectical differences and phonetic corruption, and added to them such concrete terms as their mental development and the circumstances of their new positions might require; and thus in course of time many or most of the generic synonymous words became specific appellations with various tribes. Thus only can I account for the singular fact that in different sections or tribes of the same race the same word frequently signifies different objects or ideas, although, when a close analysis is possible, those objects will generally be found to have been, or were deemed to be, generally related. For instance, in the Polynesian family of languages, including the pre-Malay dialect of Malaysia, we find the following apparent confusion of terms: Rotti, ngeo, black; Batchin, ngoa, black. Hawaii, kea, white, koae, white; North Celebes, kuloh, white; Tidore, kura-chi, yellow. New Zealand, kura, red; Ceram, marah, merah, blue, and poporole, yellow; Hawaii, mele, yellow, and popolo, blue, dark. Thus also in Celebes, bokati; in Buru, boti; in Amblaw, pue, and in Amboyna, pueni, signifies rat. Gilolo, boki; Hawaii, popoki, cat. Buru, babue; Hawaii, puaa; New Zealand, puaka, hog.
Thus in Irish, baban, child. Arab, babos, the young of either man or beast. Malay, babi, a pig. Baba, father. Celebes, babi-rusa, pig-deer. Sangvir Islands, baba, a monkey. Latin, pupus. Hence the two English words, babe and pup.
And thus also in the naming of metals, we see that in the Welsh mettel and the Greek metallon the original generic signification of the word metal, or its root, has been retained. Now let us see the different uses to which this word has been put and the different changes it has undergone: Hindu (Khol), medh; Hawaiian, meki, iron. Scandinavian, messing; Welsh, pros; Saxon, bros, brass. German, eisen, iron; messer, knife. Malay and Javan, besi, busi, bisi; Ethiopian, basal; Celebes, wasy, ase, iron. Latin, aes, copper. Amboyna, pisi-putih, silver (literally “white iron”).
I look upon the Hindu-Khol and Hawaiian terms as the oldest remaining representatives [[342]]of the original root which may have had the compound sound of mb,—mbeki, mbesi—of which different dialects retained one or the other, or discarded both. That the original idea expressed by that word was metals in general, and not any specific kind of metal, I consider conclusively shown from the Amboyna term for silver, pisi-putih, meaning literally white iron, as well as from the various specific metals which the word has been made to designate, such as iron, copper, brass and silver.
Among the Southern Polynesians, the Rarotongans also had a name for iron. They called it kurima; but I am unable to trace its linguistic relationship. It may refer to the Gilolo, kur-achi, the name for gold as well as for yellow. If -achi in kur-achi is a dialectual variation of the Celebes term ase or wasy, then the first syllable represents kura, a Polynesian and pre-Malay word for red, bright, yellow, and thus the compound word kurachi becomes analogous to the Amboyna pisi-putih, and would signify the red or yellow iron or metal.