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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

[introduction]

(1) One of the most untrustworthy of evidences of race is language. For languages will not mix except in their vocabulary; and there it is so easy for an alien word to take on a familiar guise and a familiar word to take on an alien guise that we may be deceived by likeness or analogy. A people strips off its linguistic apparel as lightly as its peculiar dress and adopts another in its place. Races have been perpetually crossing since the beginning of mankind. But languages only displace each other or make compromise by rubbing off each other's grammatical or phonological peculiarities. And derivations are the most delusive of all lines of historical or prehistoric investigation.

(2) Yet there is something to be got at times from the general affinities and characteristics of a language. And Maori has not escaped the efforts of the linguistic investigator, as an evidence of race. For a time it was assumed to be an offshoot of Malay. And the result was the usual fallacy. The Polynesians were declared to be, like the Malays, a mongoloid race. And the misleading name "Malayo-Polynesian" still lingers as descriptive of race even in the latest histories and descriptions of the Pacific, and induces the most grievous misconceptions as to the affinities of the South Sea Islanders. The term is as misleading when applied to language. For Malay as the tongue of a mongoloid people page 82is assumed to be agglutinative, or, in other words, to express the grammatical relations by symbolic elements that are, unlike inflections, detachable from the stems. And Maori is constantly classified as an agglutinative and even as a Turanian language.

(3) But there is nothing agglutinative about it. And the remains of inflections apparent in it indicate that one of the languages that it displaced was inflectional, if not both. Now the only inflectional languages are either Aryan or Semitic, both types belonging only to Caucasian peoples. In one relic, the internal plural, it seems to have affinity with the Semitic. But in most of the remains of inflection it points to Aryan parentage. It seems, therefore, not unlikely that one or more Aryan tongues went to the making of it.