Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/536

518 region. It is curious that over this wide area from Madagascar to Hawaii only one type of language is spoken by the remotest islanders, belonging to all races, and having attained the most varied degrees of culture. The black and woolly-haired Melanesians of the South Pacific Islands, the warlike Maories of New Zealand, the gentle, brown Polynesians, the yellow Mongoloid and Mohammedan people of Java, the dark and half-negrolike Malagasy of Madagascar, all speak varieties of this widely diffused language. At one time it was supposed that the Malays, those active Vikings of the far East, had carried their own tongue to these remote places; but then, as Mr. A. H. Keane has pointed out, Malay itself is not the most primitive, but the latest and most developed, member of the group. It answers to French rather than to Latin; it is like modern Danish rather than modern Icelandic. The truth seems to be, as Mr. Keane suggests, that the language in question is a very old one, originally belonging to the true Polynesians. Before their arrival the Pacific isles were peopled by the low black race whom we call Melanesians. Many of the archipelagoes, however, were afterward conquered and colonized by the lighter and essentially Caucasian people, closely akin to our own, whom we call Polynesians. These white Polynesians intermixed and intermarried more or less with the black Melanesians, remaining relatively pure and light-colored in a few of the archipelagoes, while in others they acquired such an infusion of black blood as made them in time dark brown or copper-colored. They imposed their own speech upon the black people everywhere, exactly as the English have imposed the tongue of Shakespeare and Newton upon the rude American and West Indian negroes. In the remotest and blackest islands, Mr. Keane points out, the oldest and crudest form of the common language survives, just as the ancient Scandinavian of the Sagas survives in Iceland; in the more advanced light-brown Polynesian groups, it has been improved and simplified into a more modernized form, just as in Europe the ancient Scandinavian has been improved and simplified into modern Danish and modern Swedish. Finally, at a still later period, the Polynesian tongue was adopted by the yellowish Mongoloid Malays, who conquered the same region, and who further improved and simplified it into the Malay of commerce, as the Normans did with the English of King Alfred. Unfortunately, however, the languages in the lump are generally called Malayan, after the latest people who adopted them, instead of Polynesian, after their original speakers; which is somewhat the same error as if we were to describe English as the Norman tongue, or speak of Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese as belonging to the French Canadian group of languages.

The fact is, we have to recognize that changes such as those