History of Language by Steven Roger Fischer
Author:Steven Roger Fischer [Fischer, Steven Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-86189-594-3
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 1999-08-15T16:00:00+00:00
POLYNESIAN LANGUAGES
Polynesian, too, claims a venerable pedigree.29 Around 6,000 years ago its parent Austronesian superfamily of languages generated a Proto-Oceanic family that included, on one hand, the Austronesian languages of New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and other islands in the West Pacific and on the other, the Proto-Eastern Oceanic family of languages. The latter comprised the western languages of the North and Central New Hebrides, Nuclear Micronesia and Rotuma and the eastern Proto-Central Pacific languages that eventually became Proto-Fijian in the west and Proto-Polynesian, by around 1500 BC, in the central eastern part of the Fiji-Tonga-Samoa crescent.
Polynesian languages are among the most conservative in the world. Polynesian vowels, vocabulary and grammar have remained extraordinarily stable over the past 3,500 years, to a degree perhaps seen nowhere else on Earth. One might ascribe this to the extreme reductionism (simplification) already present in the Proto-Polynesian basis – few consonants, simple monosyllabic and bisyllabic vocabulary, frequent reduplication (word doubling, like hulahula) and a very limited number of particles in order to show grammar. After this, the changes that occurred in Polynesian languages are generally one-stage consonantal shifts, such as k to ‘, the glottal stop; ng to n or ‘; and t to k, that are almost dialectal in nature, allowing near-intelligibility across Polynesia. The remarkable conservatism and homogeneity of the Polynesian languages is probably also the result of continuous active trading between most island groups until only several hundred years ago.
Unlike most other language families, Polynesian contains no member language whose inclusion is controversial. However, the delineation between language and dialect is often unclear, owing to the large number of similar languages sharing a nearly identical vocabulary except for minor, easily identifiable phonological substitutions. For example, ‘house’ is Samoan fale, Tahitian fare, Rapanui (Easter Island) hare, Māori whare and Hawaiian hale. There are around 36 Polynesian languages spoken today, from the Solomon Islands in the western Pacific to Easter Island in the distant south-eastern Pacific, that are all descended from a single original community who, around 3,500 years ago, were developing in their new isolation, with only sporadic contact with the homeland, a unique culture and language that millennia later Westerners would call ‘Polynesian’ from Greek poly ‘many’ and nēsos ‘island’.
After differentiation from its sister Proto-Fijian, Proto-Polynesian had experienced a protracted period of isolated development, probably on Tonga.30 Throughout Polynesia’s history the common cause of linguistic differentiation continued to be the removal of speakers from one island or archipelago to another. The linguistic continuity of the settling population was assured, because small numbers of subsequent visitors would not have imposed their language on a large island population. On Tonga in the second millennium BC, the proto-language then split into two separate families: Proto-Tongic (which eventually generated Tongan and Niuean) and the Proto-Nuclear Polynesian family of languages which probably had its origin in the settlement of Samoa. Around 2,000 years ago Proto-Nuclear Polynesian speakers migrated to the Northwest Marquesas Islands where they succeeded in establishing a permanent settlement.
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