A fantastic but dying language—The Polynesian or Maori Tongue—Making of
the first lexicons—Words taken from other languages—Decay of
vocabularies with decrease of population—Humors and whimsicalities
of the dictionary as arranged by foreigners.
MALICIOUS Gossip and Le Brunnec taught me Marquesan in the “man-eating
isle of Hiva-Oa,” as Stevenson termed my home. After supper or dinner I
had a lesson in my _paepae_; often in a mixed group, for the beginnings
of democracy are in the needs of company. Here were the governor, the
highest official, an army officer and surgeon; Le Brunnec, a small
trader; Kekela, a Hawaiian; Puhe, the hunchback servant of Bapp, the
trader; Exploding Eggs, Ghost Girl, and Malicious Gossip and her
husband, Mouth of God. The governor spoke French and a very little
English, Le Brunnec those and Marquesan, Mouth of God and his wife
Marquesan and a trifle of French, Kekela Marquesan and English, and the
hunchback Marquesan only. Ghost Girl, of course, knew only that, but she
never spoke at all except to beg for rum or tobacco. Lonesomeness made
us intimate despite our difference of origin, status and language. We
talked about the Marquesan language, and we two comparative new-comers
strove to enlarge our vocabulary.
The derivation of words is an absorbing pursuit. Enwrapped in it are
history and romance, the advance from the primitive, the gradual march
of civilization, and, besides, many a good laugh; for man made merry as
he came up, and the chatterings of the missing links are often heard in
the chase through the buried centuries for the beginnings of language.
The Aryan, English’s ancestor, was originally made up of a single
consonant between two vowels, and I fancied I was speaking my ancestral
words in this aboriginal tongue.
“There is nothing more fascinating than etymologies. To the uninitiated
the victim seems to have eaten of ‘insane roots that take the reason
prisoner’; while the illuminate too often looks upon the stems and
flowers of language, the highest achievements of thought and poesy, as
mere handles by which to pull up the grim tubers that lie at the base of
articulate expression, sacred knobs of speech, sacred to him as the
potato to the Irishman.” James Russell Lowell had himself eaten of that
maddening weed. These Marquesan verbal radicals engaged me both by their
interest and their humor.
The erudite philologist may harken back to the Chaldaic or another dead
language of Asia or Africa and make ponderous tomes upon his research,
but the amateur can dig as he plays only by being actually with a
simple, semi-savage people, as I was, and finding among them, still
active, the base and slight growth of human thought and emotion in
speech. The most alluring tongue in sound and origin is the Maori, and
Marquesan is Maori. It is spoken from Hawaii to New Zealand, and is
termed the “grand Polynesian” language. The people of those two groups
of islands, as well as those of the Marquesan, Society, Friendly,
Paumotuan, Samoan, Tongan, and some other small archipelagos, have it as
their vernacular, though its variations are so great as to prevent
converse except limitedly between the different islands. The Maori
tongue is as full of melancholy as are those passing races. Soon it will
be lost to use, like the ancient Greek or the mellifluous idiom of the
cultivated Incas. It is decaying so fast now that a few years mark a
decided loss of words, and lessen the adherence to any standard. Yet it
is the most charming of all present expressions of thought or emotion,
and it is a great pity that it perishes. One sighs for a South Seas Sinn
Fein to revivify it.
The Polynesians, as scientists call them, know themselves, and therefore
their tongue as Maori. And just as “British” to an Englishman is a word
of pride, and “American” to our patriotic schoolboys and orators the
greatest word ever coined, so “Maori” actually means first-class,
excellent, fine. The Maoris were hundred per centers before the Chosen
People.
I have lived much with Maori folk in many archipelagos and listened for
years to their soft and simple, sweet and short words. Their speech is
like the rippling of gentle waters, the breezes through the
breadfruit-trees. It has color and rhythm and a euphonism unequalled.
Language begins as poetry and ends as algebra, but here the algebraic
stage was not reached, and there remained something of the unconscious
uprush of its beginning, and the subliminal laws of mind which shaped
its construction. For the Maori is a very old language, older than Greek
or Latin, and was cut off from other languages at the outset of culture,
before the mud of the Tigris was made into pots. The Marquesan indigene
was never so complex, as in acute civilization, that his language could
not tell what he thought and felt, though he, too, had art to supplement
words, as his tattooing, carving, houses, and temples prove.
The Maori has one inflexible rule, that no word shall end in a
consonant, that no two consonants shall be together, and that all
letters in a word be sounded.
There are only fifteen letters, or sounds, in the pure alphabet, b, c,
d, j, h, l, q, s, w, x, and y being unknown. In some dialects other
letters have been introduced in the adaptation of foreign words. They
are not, however, properly Polynesian. Words are usually unchangeable,
but pronouns and the auxiliary verb “to be” and many adjectives and
verbs have curious doubling quality, like _ino iino; horo, hohoro,
horohoro; haere, hahaere_. _Ii_ in Marquesan means “anger”; _iiii_ means
“red in the face from anger.” The adjective follows the noun, as in _moa
iti_, little chicken, _iti_ is the adjective. The subject comes after
the verb “to be,” expressed or understood, or after the verb that
denotes the action of the subject.
The Maoris knew no genders except those for beings by nature male or
female, and these they indicate by following words. In Tahitian, _tane_
means “man,” and _vahine_ “woman,” or “male and female.” Thus I was
called often O’Brien _tane_, and, where the same proper names are
applied to men and women, the word _tane_ or _vahine_ indicates the sex:
The sign of a well-known merchant in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti and
the entrepôt of the South Seas reads, “Tane Meuel,” the Tane being the
name his proud parents gave him when born to show their delight at his
being a boy.
While there is a dispute over the origin of the Maori, my friend,
McMillan Brown of New Zealand, a supreme authority, believes it
separated from the primeval Aryan a millennium or two ago, in the stone
age, and came into the Pacific with the migration that first brought
women into these waters. Some scholars say the language is to be classed
with the modern European tongues, and especially with English. They cite
the reduction of inflection to a minimum, the expression of the
grammatical relationship of words by their order in the sentence, the
use of auxiliaries and participles, the power of interchanging the
significant parts of speech as occasion requires; the indication of the
number of nouns by articles or other definitives, cases by prepositions,
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
participle.
As English spoken in isolated mountain regions—among the poor whites of
the Middle West and South of the United States—becomes attenuated and
broken, so in many of these islands and archipelagos the Maori language
became differentiated by climate and environment, and shriveled by the
limitations of its use. The Marquesan has been weakened by phonetic
decay, the l and r almost disappearing, and in some places, too, the k
being hardly ever heard.
[Illustration:
The author with his friends at council
]
As a nation perishes, so does its language. As its numbers decrease, the
vocabulary of the survivors shrinks. It does not merely cease to grow;
it lessens. Cornwall proved that and Wales; Ireland and Scotland
exemplify it now. A language waxes with the mass and activities of its
speakers. Scholars may preserve a grammar, as the school Latin, or as
the Sinn Fein is doing in Ireland, but the body and blood of the vulgate
speech waste and ebb without the pulse of growth. Speech fattens with
usage. The largest number of words in any language is found in that
language which most people speak. The most enterprising race spreads its
language farthest by religion, commerce, and conquest.
[Illustration:
Photo from L. Gauthier
House of governor of Paumotu Islands. Atoll of Fakarava
]
All these Polynesian tongues are dying with the people. Corrupted first
by the admixture of European words, their glossaries written by men
unborn to the land, the racial interests that fed them killed by the
destruction of customs and ambitions, these languages are moribund, and
as unlike those spoken before the white came as is the bison to the
family cow.
The French observer Bovis said seventy years ago that only a few
Tahitians understood and spoke pure Tahitian. No one does now. Yet,
obsolescent and garbled as are these spiritual victims of pale-face
domination, the South Sea folk cling to them affectionately. I attended
the first sessions of the Hawaiian legislature under American
territorial government. All proceedings were in both English and
Hawaiian, many of the legislators not understanding English after eighty
years of intimate relations with England and America. They, like the
other Maoris, had not learned other tongues, but had let their own lapse
into a bastard _patois_.
The Hawaiian is akin to the Marquesan. The variations consist in not
using in one dialect words in use in another, in the sense attached to
the same words, in the changing of vowels and of consonants in the same
words, and also by the replacement of consonants by a click of the
tongue. Almost all dialects have these unuttered consonants expressed by
the guttural accentuation of the vowel following.
I must know French to approach Marquesan, because these islands are
French for eighty years, and I know of no practical grammar except that
of Monseigneur Dordillon, written in 1857, and of no procurable
dictionary but his. Both are in French.
A tragedy originating in petty discipline or episcopal jealousy saddened
the last days of the writer, Bishop Dordillon. He had created out of the
mouths of his neophytes the written Marquesan tongue, and he made his
dictionary his life-work. They would not let him publish it.
Ecclesiastical authorities, presumably of Chile,—for all Catholic
missionaries here were under that see in early days,—forbade it. After
forty years of labor upon the book, he was allowed to put it to print,
but not to affix his name as author. Against this prohibition the sturdy
prelate set his face.
“Not for himself,” said the vicar, _Père_ David, to me, “but for the
church and our order, he would not be robbed of the honor. He died very
old, and confided his manuscript to a fellow-priest. For fifty years
each missionary to these islands copied it for his personal use. Ten
thousand nights have thus passed because of the jealousy of some prelate
in Valparaiso or in Paris. Pierre Chaulet, of our order, the _Sacré
Cœur_, revised the book after forty-five years’ residence here.”
The Tahitian was the first Maori language reduced to writing. No
Polynesian race had a written literature nor an alphabet. Writing was
not invented nor thought of when they left their European home, nor did
they acquire it in Malaysia. The Polynesians marked certain epochs and
events by monuments, and consecrated them with ceremonies. These events
also marked their language, which was peculiarly susceptible to change
and addition. It was abundant, and all the details of their material
life and history were impressed upon the language in shades of meanings
and words. In Tahiti the finer meanings disappeared ninety years ago,
and the adverbs and degrees of comparison were lost. In the Marquesas,
because of the lesser infiltration of whites, the language in its purity
lasted longer. One of the mutineers of the _Bounty_, Midshipman Peter
Heywood, who chose to remain in Tahiti rather than sail with Christian,
wrote the first vocabulary of Tahitian in prison at Execution Dock in
England. Bligh had determined to hang Heywood, and, awaiting his
seemingly assured death, the young officer in his death cell set down
the words he had learned in the happy days in the Isle of Venus, with
their connotation in English. One may imagine it was a sad yet consoling
task to live again the scenes of his joyous exile, and that each word of
Tahitian he wrote conjured for him a picture of the scene in which he
had learned it, and perhaps of the soft lips that had often repeated it
to him. It is pleasant to know that the youthful lexicographer did not
mount the gallows, and that his vocabulary was eagerly studied by the
first missionaries leaving England for the South Seas on the _Duff_. The
first word the clerics heard when the Tahitians boarded the _Duff_ was
_taio_, friend, and the reverends wrote to England that as the “heathen
danced on the deck in sign of hospitality and friendship, we sang them,
‘O’er the gloomy hills of darkness.’” With Heywood’s list as a
preparation, they established an alphabet for Tahiti which fitted the
dulcet sounds as they registered on their untuned ears. The general rule
was to give the vowels their Italian value and to sound the consonants
as in English. Their fonts of type were limited, and they had to use
makeshifts of other letters when they ran out of the proper ones. They
made monumental errors in their monumental toil, errors unavoidably due
to their not being philologists, nor even well educated—errors
perpetuated and incorporated in the language as finally written. This
Tahitian dictionary and grammar formed the basis of all similar books in
the Marquesan, Hawaiian, and other dialects. What store of ancient
tongues the missionaries had, they put into linguafacturing religious
words for the Tahitians. In fact, they were so busy inventing words for
ordinary use, and for their prayers, sermons, and the translation of the
Bible, they did not record many native words. They bowdlerized the whole
Polynesian language, and emasculated an age-old tongue from which we
might have gathered in its strength something of the spirit of our Aryan
forefathers.
A chief difficulty of the makers of the written Polynesian languages was
the adjectives. Primitive peoples have not the wealth of these that
civilized nations possess, and fine shadings here are often expressed by
intonation, grimace, or gesture.
There is no available Tahitian-English lexicon. The London Missionary
Society published one before the French seized Tahiti in the forties. It
is out of print, and as obsolete as to present-day Tahitian as Dr.
Johnson’s once-famous tome is as to English. The only copies are in the
hands of the Mormon, Josephite and other English-speaking missionaries
in Tahiti, and in the libraries of collectors. It cannot be bought in
Tahiti. Monseigneur Tepano Jaussen wrote one in French. I have it, dated
at Paris, 1898; but so fast is the Tahitian tongue degrading into a
bloodless wretched jumble that it, too, is almost archaic.
“A Vocabulary of the Nukahiwa Language; including a Nukahiwa-English
Vocabulary and an English-Nukahiwa Vocabulary” was printed in Boston in
1848. No living Nukahiwan, or Marquesan, would understand much of it, as
there has been such radical change and degeneracy in the dialect in the
seventy years since it was written, and so few Marquesans survive.
The language shows that at one time they did not count beyond four, and
the higher numbers were expressed by multiples of four. Afterward they
came to five, which they made _lima_ or the fingers of one hand. When
the ten or denary system was adopted, the word _umi_, or whiskers, was
chosen to mean ten, or a multitude.
The cardinal numbers are sometimes tiresome. For instance, thirty-one is
_E tahi tekau me te onohuu me te mea ke e tahi_. I once remarked to a
Marquesan chief that the Marquesan people said many words to mean a
trifle and took a long time to eat their food.
“What else have we to do?” he asked me.
Strangely, the larger numbers are shorter. Twenty thousand is _tini_.
Should I wish to say “once,” meaning at one time, I say, _mamua mamua
mamua_; more anciently _kakiu kakiu kakiu kakiu_; “a very long time
ago,” _tini tini tini tini_; “quite a long time ago,” _tini hahaa tini
hahaa tini hahaa tini hahaa_; but “always” is _anatu_ and “soon” _epo_.
This last word is a custom as well as a word, for it is like the Spanish
_mañana_ and the Hawaiian _mahope_, the Tahitian _ariana_, or our own
dilatory “by and by.”
The variations between the dialects in the different groups is great,
and even in the same group, or on the same island, meanings are not the
same. In the Marquesas, the northwestern islands have a distinct dialect
from the southeastern. Valleys close together have different words for
the same object. These changes consist of dropping or substituting
consonants, t for k, l for r, etc., but to the beginner they are
baffling. Naturally, the letters, as written, have the Latin value.
Thus, Tahiatini is pronounced Tah-heea-teenee, and Puhei, Poo-hay-ee.
For me words have color, form, character: They have faces,
ports, manners, gesticulations;—they have moods, humours,
eccentricities:—they have tints, tones, personalities.
Lafcadio Hearn might have written that about the Maori tongue.
The Marquesan language is sonorous, beautiful, and picturesque, lending
itself to oratory, of which the Polynesians are past masters. Without a
written tongue until the last century, they perfected themselves in
speaking. It was a treat to hear a Marquesan in the full flood of
address, recalling the days of old and the glories departed, or a
preacher telling the love of God or the tortures reserved for the
damned. They were graceful and extremely witty. They kept their audience
laughing for minutes or moved them quickly to tears. Their fault was
that shared by most European and American orators, long-windedness. The
Marquesans have many onomatopes, or words imitating natural sounds, and
they are most pleasing and expressive. The written words hardly convey
the close relation they bear to the reality when spoken. The _kivi_, a
bird, says, “_Kivi! kivi! kivi!_” The cock says, “_Kokoao! va tani te
moa! Kokoao!_” The god that entered the spirit of the priestess made a
noise in doing so that was like this: “_A u u u u u u u u u a! A u u u u
u a!_”
When the pig eats, the sound he makes is thus: “_Afu! afu! afu! afu!
afu! afu! afu! apu! apu! apu! apu! apu! apu! apu!_” In repeating these
sounds the native abates no jot of the whole. The pig’s _afus_ are just
so many; no more, no fewer.
When the cocoanut falls to the ground the sound is “_tu!_” The drinker
who takes a long draft makes the noise, “_Aku! aku! aku! aku! aku!
aku!_”
_Moemoe_ is “the cry one makes of joy after killing any one.”
It is notable that in English the names for edible animals when alive
are usually the foundational Saxon, but when dead and ready for food
they are Norman. Ox, steer, bull, and cow are Saxon. Beef and viand are
Norman. Calf is Saxon, but veal is Norman; sheep is Saxon, mutton
Norman. Probably the caretaker of these animals, the Saxon villain who
tended them, made his names for them stick in the composite language,
while the sitters at table, the Normans and those who aped their tongue,
applied the names of the prepared meat as they plied their knives. Pig
and hog, the latter meaning a gilded pig, are English, but pork is
Norman.
So in the study of Marquesan one finds that the common objects have
older names than those less usual. The missionaries had a hard time
suiting a word to the devil. With their vision of him, horns, hoof and
tail, they had to be content with _kuhane anera maaa_. _Kuhane_ means
soul or spirit, _anera_ means heavenly spirit, and _maaa_ means wicked,
and also a firebrand or incendiary. So Great Fern, my Presbyterian
neighbor, gave me his idea that the devil—Tatana, as Satan is
pronounced—was a kind of cross between a man and a wild boar running
along with a bunch of lighted candlenuts, setting fire to the houses of
the wicked.
It is not easy to learn well the Marquesan language, but it is not hard
to acquire a smattering of the Lingua Franca spoken by natives to whites
and whites to natives. The language itself has been so corrupted by this
intercourse that few speak it purely.
Amusing are the English words adapted or melted into the native tongue,
and it is interesting to trace their derivation. They call any tin or
metal box _tipoti_ (pronounced “teepotee”). The first metal receptacles
they saw aboard the first ships were the teapots of the sailors, and
they took the word as applicable to all pots and boxes of metal. The
dictionary says “_Tipoti—petite boite en fer-blanc_.”
Beef is _Pifa_ (peefa). _Poteto_—pronounced potato—means ship’s biscuits
or American crackers or cakes. The early whalesmen held out their
hardtack to the natives and offered to exchange it for potatoes or yams.
The natives took it that the biscuits were potatoes, and call them so
to-day.
A curious and mixed meaning is that of _fishuka_, which one might think
meant a fish-hook. It means a safety-pin, and is a sought-for article by
the women. The Marquesans had fishhooks always, and a name for them, and
so gave the English name to safety-pins, which appear like unto them.
_Metau_ is a fish-hook, and a pin is _piné_ (pee-nay). There are
hundreds of queer and distorted words like these. Bread is faraoa,
pronounced frowwa, which is flower, with an r instead of an l, as they
have no l in their alphabet. In Tahiti, _taofe_ is coffee. K and t and l
and r are interchangeable in many Polynesian languages, and fashion has
at times banned one or the other or exchanged them. Whims or even
decrees by the pagan priests have expelled letters and words from their
vocabularies, and some have been taboo to certain classes or to all.
Papeete was once upon a time Vaiete, which means the same, a basket of
water, the site conserving the streams of the hills. Vaiete was
smothered under a clerical bull and forgotten along with other words
thought not up-to-date.
I have heard an aged and educated American woman born in Honolulu call
it Honoruru, and Waikiki, Waititi, as she had learned when a girl.
Coffee here is _kahe_, not unlike the Japanese _kohi_.
Area is the same word in Latin and Maori, and virtually in English. It
means space, in all. _Ruma_, a house, is much like room, and _poaka_ or
_puaka_, a pig, is akin to the Latin _porcus_, and the Spanish _puerca_.
When the missionaries here sought to translate a beloved phrase, “The
sacred heart of Jesus,” familiar in Catholic liturgy, they were puzzled.
The Polynesian believes with some of the Old Testament writers that the
seat of sentiment is in the bowels. “My very bowels yearned” is a
favorite expression of Oriental authors.
_Koekoe_ is the Marquesan word for entrails. It means also intelligence,
character, and conscience. A man of good heart is in Marquesan a man of
good bowels. The good fathers were sore put to it to write their
invocation to the “bleeding heart of the Savior,” and one finds a
warning in Bishop Dordillon’s dictionary:
Les Canaques mettent dans les entrailles (_koekoe_) les
sentiments que nous mettons dans le cœur (_houpo_).
Quelquefois il convient de traduire ad sensum pluto que ad
verbum et vice versa; Le cœur de Jesus—te houpo a Ietu.
Extreme unction, the sacrament, is _eteremaotio_, pronounced,
“aytairaymahoteeo.”
The daily usage of common English words fixed certain ideas in the minds
of the islanders for all time.
_Oli mani_, a corruption of old man, is used for anything old; hence a
blunt, broken knife or a ragged pair of trousers is _oli mani_.
A clergyman is _mitinané_, pronounced mitt-in-ahny, an effort at
missionary. In Tahiti the word is _mitinare_ or _mikonare_, and is one
of ribald humor. It is also a bitter epithet against one who is
sanctimonious. The white traders, beachcombers, and officials have given
the word this significance by their ridicule of religion and its
professors.
What more picturesque record of the introduction of cattle into Samoa
than _bullamacow_? It is the generic name in those islands for beef,
canned beef, and virtually all kinds of canned meats. A child could
trace it to the male and female bovine ruminants first put ashore there,
and nominated by the whites “bull and a cow.”
The good Bishop Dordillon notes that a cook is _enata tunu kai_, but
that the common word is _kuki_, and for kitchen _fae kuki_. That _kuki_
is our own cook, as the Marquesans heard the sailors call him—cooky.
_Fae_ is house.
A pipe is _paifa_ (pyfa), and tobacco _paké_ (pahkay), rough
pronunciations of the English words.
All through Polynesia the generic name among foreigners for a native is
Kanaka, which is the Hawaiian word for man, or the human race. The
Marquesan man is _kenana_ or _enata_ or _enana_, and woman _vehine_. The
Tahitians and Hawaiians say _taata_ or _tane_ for man, and _vahine_ or
_wahine_ for woman. The French word for Kanaka is _canaque_. This word
is opprobrious or not according to the degree of civilization. The
Marquesans often call themselves _canaques_, as a negro calls himself a
negro; but I have seen a Tahitian of mixed blood weep bitterly when
termed a Kanaka. Perhaps it is as in the Southern part of the United
States, where the colored people refer to one another commonly as
niggers, but resent the word from a white.
Pig in Marquesan is _puaa_ or _puaka_.
Piggishness in English means greediness; but _cochonnerie_, the French
verbal equivalent, means filth or obscenity, and in Marquesan has its
counterpart in _haa puaa_, to be indecent; _hee haa puaa_, to go naked,
and _kaukau haa puaa_, to bathe naked, words doubtless originating under
missionary tutelage, as when the Catholic priests were all-powerful,
they made laws forbidding nudity in public. In fact, a noted English
writer who spent some time here was arrested and fined for sleeping upon
his veranda one hot noon in the garb of Adam before the apple episode.
The Catholic missionaries here never bathed in the rivers or sea, and
had no bath arrangements in their house. Godliness has no relation to
cleanliness. Celibate man the world over had the odor of sanctity.
Shark is _mako_, and, curiously, _tumu mako_ is a gross eater, or “pig”
in our adopted sense, while _vehine mako_ is a prostitute. _E haa mako_
is to deliver over to prostitution. Probably this last phrase has been
coined by the clergy for lack of a more opposite one. _Hateté_ in
Tahitian is chastity, for which the natives had no word nor idea.
When card-playing was introduced by the whites, its nomenclature was
adapted. _Peré_ or _pepa_ are cards. _Pere_ is play, pronounced p’ray,
and _pepa_ is paper. _Taimanu_, _heata_, _tarapu_, and _pereda_ are
diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades; _teata_ is the knave; _te hai_—the
high—is the ace; and _furu_ is a full. _Faráoa_ is flour or bread and
_faráoa peré_—flour play, flour or bread-like playing-cards—are biscuits
or crackers. _Afa miniti_ is a half-minute, or a little while. Others of
the hundreds of bastard words now in the language and dictionary are:
_Niru_, needle; _pia_, beer; _poti_, boat; _purumu_, broom; _putete_,
potato; _punu_, spoon; _Roretona_, London; _tara_, dollar; _tavana_,
governor or chief; _tohita_, sugar; _uaina_, wine; _tihu, dix sous_, or
half a franc; _fira_, fiddle; _puka_, book. I must not omit the
delightful _verkuti_ for very good, or all right, or the stiff
_eelemosina_, for alms, for which also, the Polynesians had no word, as
no one was a beggar.
As did the American Indians, the Polynesians learned English and other
European tongues through religion. The discoverers, who were officials,
traders, or adventurers gained a smattering of the native language, but
hardly ever had the perseverance, if the education, to gather a thorough
knowledge. Almost all the first modern dictionaries and grammars were
written by clerics. The prime reason for their endeavors was to
translate the sacred Scriptures into their neophytes’ language and to be
able to preach them. The Bible has been the first book of all outlandish
living languages to be reduced to writing for hundreds of years.
Consequently, its diction, its mode of speech, and its thoughts have
molded the island tongues. Words lacking to translate biblical ideas had
to be invented, and the missionaries became the inventors. Some with
Hebrew and Greek and Latin at their service used bits of them to create
new words, and others drew on their imaginations, as do infants in
naming people and things about them. In writing their dictionaries, they
limited the European vocabulary to necessary, nice, or religious words,
and the vernacular to all they could find, with a strict omission of
those conveying immodest ideas. As the Polynesians had no morals from
the Christian point of view, a great number of their commonest words
were lost.
The Bible was done into Marquesan in the forties by English Protestants,
and the old Hawaiian missionaries in the Marquesas made much of it in
their teachings. It is not popular in French, and few copies survive.
The Catholics do not recommend it to the laity. Protestantism is
apathetic; yet I have seen a leper alone on his _paepae_ deep in the
Scriptures, and when I asked him if he got comfort from them, I was
answered, “They are strong words for a weak man, and better than pig.”
The same corruptions that have destroyed the original purity of the
Hawaiian and Tahitian tongues has marred that of these islands. The
French officials had hardly ever remained long enough to encompass the
language here, and seldom had they been of the scholarly type.
Rulers over colonies make feeble effort to speak well their subjects’
tongues. Perhaps two of the dozen governors, military and civil, the
Philippines have had under American ownership could talk Spanish fairly
well, and none spoke the aboriginal tongues which are the key to native
thought. They knew the governed through interpreters, and therefore knew
nothing really of them. As our boys laugh at foreigners’ ignorance, so
do foreign colonists laugh at ours. I saw a famous American governor
stand aghast when, asking his Filipino host, as he thought, for “a night
lamp then and there,” the astounded _presidente_ of a village brought
before the assembled company a something never paraded in polite
society.
The missionary dictionaries of the Polynesian dialects, preserving only
a very limited number of the words once existing, and hardly any of the
light and shade, the idioms and picture phrases, of these close
observers of nature, remind one of Shakespeare’s criticism, “They have
been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”
The English missionaries put the Marquesan sounds into English letters,
but when their day was done in Tahiti, and the French came to power
because of French Catholic missionaries being expelled at the
instigation of Protestant clerics, the poor Marquesans had to unlearn
their English and take up French.
In Marquesan there never was an English dictionary circulated that I
know of, and so the natives’ first European language was French as far
back as books and schools were concerned; but the commerce has been
mostly in English, the whalers and the traders talk English, and all
Polynesia is stamped by the heel of the Saxon.
A German army officer who traveled with me lamented that in German Samoa
the language used is English when not Samoan, even the German officials
being forced to use it.
On the schooners all commands are in English, though the captains are
French and the crews Tahitian, whose English is confined to these words
alone. At the German traders’ in Taha-Uku the accounts are in English or
American. It is the effect of the long dominance of the English on the
sea and in commerce.
A chief difficulty of the makers of the written Polynesian languages was
the adjectives. Primitive peoples have not the wealth of these that
civilized nations possess, and fine shadings here are often expressed by
intonation, grimace, or gesture.
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