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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

Maori Grammar, like English, is the Result of the — Collision of two Languages

Maori Grammar, like English, is the Result of the
Collision of two Languages

(4) The true classification of Maori is with the modern European languages, and especially with the most modern of all languages, English. It has reduced inflection to a minimum, and expresses the grammatical relationship of words chiefly by their order in the sentence, and the use of auxiliaries and particles. It has the power of interchanging the significant parts of speech, the noun, adjective, verb, and adverb, as occasion requires or dictates. The number of nouns is indicated by the articles or other definitives, the case by prepositions, the gender by the addition of the word for male or female, the degree of adjectives by a separate word, and the mood and tense of verbs by a particle.

(5) It is, in short, as uninflectional or isolating a language as English, and it is agreed by most philologists now that page 83this type is by no means primitive: is, in fact, the end of a long process instead of the beginning. The farther we go back in the history of a language the more inflectional we find it; and it is the most barbarous instead of the most cultivated that has most inflections as a rule. The exception of Greek and Latin at first misled philology. And if we take English, the modern language in which the process of inflectional decay has gone furthest, we see the true cause of it plainly marked. It is the clash of grammars. It is the intercourse of two peoples in the same country, each of whom fails to master the inflections of the other's grammar. Anglo-Saxon was more inflected than any modern European tongue, and, though the process of inflectional decay had set in through the inroads and conquests of the Danes, it was not completed till the Normans settled as the aristocracy and rulers of the country. These immigrants, being in a minority, had to adopt the language of the Saxons, but in doing so they failed to understand or master the inflections, and at last did without them, whilst they introduced vast numbers of words from French into the popular speech. But traces of the old inflections have been left, especially in the pronoun and the verb, parts of speech that have so much of the relational in them that they cannot easily do without something formal in their changes. And in the noun the plural is still indicated by an external change, whilst in a few it shows internal change.

(6) Now nothing could better describe the grammar of Maori than this. The pronouns and the verbs are the parts of speech that show the remains of inflection, whilst a few of the nouns indicate their plural by internal change; "tangata," a man, has its first vowel short in the singular and long in the plural, so "wahine," a woman, and half a dozen others. But the process of rubbing out the inflections has gone much further in Maori than in English. It has page 84retained no external method of indicating the number or gender, except by the addition of another word. The internal inflection for number in those few nouns is probably the result of the same phonological law as still makes "man" in English take as plural "men," the law of Umlautthat is, the original inflection has modified the vowel of the root and then disappeared. In the Maori pronoun the disintegration of grammatical form is perhaps not quite so advanced, for we have a dual in the personal pronouns, though not in the others, whilst in the demonstrative the singular "tenei," "this," is formed from the plural "enei," "these," by prefixed inflection. In the Maori verb the old inflections have left fewer traces than in the English verb; in fact there is only one, that for voice. The passive is formed from the active by an affix, which changes to suit the termination; the original form of this was probably "ia," the third personal pronoun singular, though it often prefixes a consonant, to suit the sound, or drops the "i." This shows the formation of the passive to be similar to that in the older Aryan languages; it was what is called in Greek grammar a middle voice; in other words, a reflexive voice, formed by the addition of a reflexive pronoun to the active voice.

(7) Now, the only explanation for this striking linguistic development is that which we know fits the modern evolution of English. Two languages far more highly inflected than modern Maori have come together in the same region and mutually destroyed the formal grammar, leaving only a few traces of the inflections.