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 The Aryan, English’s ancestor, was originally made up of a single consonant between two vowels, and I fancied I was speaking my ancestral words in this aboriginal tongue.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.

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.

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 Coeur, 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 coeur (houpo).

Quelquefois il convient de traduire ad sensum pluto que ad verbum et vice versa; Le coeur 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.