[[221]]
PART II [[222]]
Source and Migration of the Polynesian Race.
In my endeavors to throw some light upon the olden times of the Hawaiian people and—to use a nautical expression—to “underrun” their historical cable, two questions have ever presented themselves at the very beginning of all inquiry,—two sphinxes at the entrance—barring the way and bewildering the traveler. They are: 1st. Whence came the Polynesian family of tribes in the Pacific? 2d. What relation do the Polynesian tribes bear to each other, as contemporary or successive rejetons from an original source, or as descendants from the descendants?
Purely physical criteria refer the Polynesian family to the great Malaysian race, but throw no light upon the question of priority between the families composing this race. On the philological grounds, however, advanced by Dr. Rae of Hana with special reference to this subject, and according to the origin and descent of language set forth by Professor Max Müller, I am led to believe that the Polynesian family is vastly older in time than the Malay family, properly so called: that is to say, the Polynesian separated from the mother stock long before the Malay. At what period in the world’s history the separation took place, it is now impossible to define. The language can here be our only guide. We find then in the Polynesian dialects numerous words strongly allied to the Sanskrit; not only in the Sanskrit of the Vedas, and as developed in the literature of the Hindus, but to the monosyllabic and dissyllabic roots of the Sanskrit, to the older, more primitive, form of speech, when the simple roots served for verbs, names and adjectives, a form of speech still retained throughout the Polynesian dialects. I am thus led to infer that the separation of the Polynesian and Sanskrit, or rather Aryan, families of speech, must have occurred before the latter took on the inflections which have since become so prominent a characteristic of all their descendants.
After reading Professor Müller’s “Lectures on the science of language” there can be little doubt that the Sanskrit of the Vedas is centuries older than the time of Solomon; that centuries more must be allowed for the development and formation of the Sanskrit, as in the Vedas, before we reach the time when the Sanskrit or its great great ancestor was spoken in that simplicity which it at one time possessed, when that and the Polynesian stood together as cognate dialects of a still older speech. We know now that the Celtic, Latin, Greek, Teutonic, Zend, Slavonic and Sanskrit were parallels, or nearly so, dialects of an older form of speech, and that they are not descended from one another. But that older form of speech, from which they sprung, has already assumed a system of inflections which has remained a genealogical and hereditary characteristic of these branches ever since, and by which their relationship has been traced back to that older form of which there is no record extant, and for which history has no name. To that older form I am inclined to believe that the Polynesian stood in the relation of an elder brother or an uncle.
Words may be imported into another language by conquest, commerce or intercourse, [[223]]without thereby indicating any generic relationship, either close or distant. Such words are simply adopted, and become instantly subjected to the particular form and rules which govern every other word in that language. A language may thus be overloaded with foreign words, yet, while its pronouns, articles and prepositions remain, they stand as living protests against the invasion of words, and point with no uncertain light, through the night of ages, to the origin and parentage of the captive tongue.
When, therefore, we find in the Polynesian dialects not only several of the Sanskrit pronouns and prepositions, but also the very roots from which these words sprung,—not as dead unintelligible articulations of speech, but as living sense-bearing words,—I am logically led to believe that the connection between the two languages is generic, not accidental; that the ancestor of the Sanskrit was at one time as simple and rude of speech as the Polynesian has remained ever since; and that at that time the two, and others besides, though with different dialectical proclivities, spoke one common tongue and started in different directions from the same officina gentium.