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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

The Language Question obstructed the Solution

The Language Question obstructed the Solution

(9) What made the problem more complicated and difficult of solution was the proximity of Southern Asia, and especially of Indonesia, and the affinity of the languages. Philology misled investigators of the racial problem. It made them believe first of all that the Malays had peopled Polynesia, in spite of the complete dissimilarity of the races in headform, features, stature, and culture. Then it kept the eyes of theorists wholly fixed in this direction.

(10) But we saw from an analysis of the language that it had no resemblance to an agglutinative or Turanian tongue, that it was the result of the collision of two or more inflectional languages like the Aryan, and that both traces of inflection and the meaning of a considerable proportion of the roots gave a strong presumption in favour of the tongues that had clashed being Aryan. But this sloughing of inflections had occurred in Indonesia before the South Asiatic migrants had left Polynesia. What did occur in the latter region was the encounter with a language of highly primitive simplicity, as far at least as the sounds were concerned. The sounds available were reduced from above a score in the Malay Archipelago to just above a dozen in Polynesia. It is the simplest and briefest of phonologies, a striking thing in so advanced a barbaric people.