Storm at Sea

November 14, 2007

We are at sea again, and we are sailing into a storm located southeast of Fiji. Lots of thunder and lightening and more rain than we have seen in a while. The Hawaiian Islands are in a drought. What rain is falling, is falling on Kauai and O’ahu and not on Maui or the Big Island.

I wrote Fiji, and I suppose I should have written Viti. I guess now is the time to make some comments about the Polynesian Migration and the languages.

Southeast Asia is generally accepted as the originating home of the Polynesians. Some researchers go so far as to identify central Taiwan as home port. Wherever it was, the Polynesians have a long history as a seafaring people. Whether they traveled as traders looking for new markets or as losers in battle looking for new homes, they did travel over long distances using celestial navigation.

Around 1500 BC the ancestors of the Polynesians, known as the Lapita people appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago in Near Oceania. Prehistorical sites in Indonesia are the closest forerunners to Lapita sites.

The pottery of the Lapita people was similar in form to that of their forebears, While the form of Lapita pottery was similar to that of their forebears, the decorative style of their pottery evolved in the Bismarcks. The designs were most elaborate during the early years of the migration and devolved over time and eastern migration to plainware pottery.

By 1000 BC, the migration had spread from Fiji to West Polynesia, including Tonga and Samoa. The eastern migration then slowed for about 1500 years. Contact continued between communities on different islands.

Around 800 BC the Polynesian culture spread from Tonga and Samoa to Eastern Polynesia areas including the Marquesas and the Society Islands, and then later to Hawaii, Easter Island, and New Zealand.

Pottery making did not persist in most of Polynesia. The Plainware pottery is considered to be a simplification of the more elaborate Lapita style and resulted from isolation. Classical Polynesian artifacts have not been found among the plainware. Plainware pottery ceases abruptly in Samoa around 0BC, and was replaced by classic Polynesian artifacts, gourds, 2 piece fishhooks, stone pounders and tattooing needles.

Back to Viti. What was happening with the languages? Fijian is an Austronesian language of the Malayo-Polynesian family spoken in Fiji. Fijian is much older than the other Polynesian languages, and it has stronger Melanesian ties. Proto-Polynesian is the theoretical source of the Polynesian languages of Tonga, Sāmoa, Tahiti, Aotearoa, Hawai’i, Rapa Nui and Niuea. There are some wonderful websites that describe extensively the links and transformation of the languages. I’ll just summarize the major letter shifts: V and W; K and T or G; L and/or R; H and F; B and P and H and S.

Most Polynesian languages have lost the original proto-Polynesian glottal stop /q/; however, it has been retained in Tongan and a few other languages including Hawaiian. In Hawaiian, the glottal stop is called the ‘akina. Its presence or absence changes the meaning of a word.

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