Notes On The Maori Polynesian Comparative Dictionary Of Mr E Tregear Being A Paper Etc Postscript PDF Download

Excerpt from The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary This work had its origin it's a desire growing in the mind of the Author to comprehend the exact meaning of words used by the Maori people. Much had been done by Europeans long resident in New Zealand, or by those of European parentage born in the country, to gather in and put on record the vernacular forms of the native speech. A large mass of material consisting of songs, legends, &c., was also at the service of a collector, although this in reality was a very small portion of that which might have been procured had not the rough and perilous work of colonization engrossed so much of the time and energies of the early settlers. This material wholly referred to New Zealand and the New Zealand branch of the Maori or Polynesian race. The science of Comparative Philology has opened up new vistas of knowledge concerning the comprehension of ancient languages, and the old etymologies of Greek as given by purely Greek scholars, or of English as given by purely English scholars, have been found to be laughably incorrect when viewed by the light of the fuller investigation which modern learning has thrown upon the mysteries of Indo-European speech. Zend, Sanscrit, the Teutonic dialects, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, all lent their stores of ancient word-treasures to unravel the difficulties found in the comprehension of each others' language, and the result was so successful that a new science emerged from the domain of the empirical, and claimed followers among those who are ever bearing on from hand to hand the torch of intellectual progress. Regarding the Maori speech of New Zealand as but a dialect of the great-Polynesian language, the Author has attempted to organize and show in a concise manner the existing related forms common to New Zealand and the Polynesian Islands. Several attempts have been made to produce a Comparative Polynesian Dictionary, but so gigantic was the labour, so enormous the mass of material, that the compilers have shrunk back appalled in the initiatory stages of the work, and all that remains of their efforts has been a few imperfect and unreliable pages of vocabulary scattered here and there through books treating of the Malayan and Pacific Islands. The present work is, at all events, continuous and sustained; it does not pretend to be a dictionary of Polynesian, but to present to the reader those Polynesian words which are related to the Maori dialect; using the word Maori (i.e., Polynesian, "native," "indigenous") in the restricted sense familiar to Europeans, as applying to the Maori people of New Zealand. Two purposes are served by the presentation of words apparently allied in sound and sense: 1st. If the Maori agrees with the Polynesian forms generally, the meaning of the word is in all probability above suspicion. If several of the Polynesian dialects agree together as to the meaning of a word, and the Maori differs, then (also probably), the Maori has lost the genuine sense of the original word, and has localised or deformed it. If the Maori word has no Polynesian affinities, then it is almost certainly a local word, either invented since the dispersion of the tribes or so warped from the primitive form as to be unrecognisable without further research. Although the Maori word may not be found directly in any other dialect, still it may be recognized in compounds; and for this purpose the comparatives are of great value. In the manner a word has suffered letter-change, and passed from dialect to dialect in decaying forms, perhaps all the history that can ever be traced of the Ancient Polynesian and his habitat may be discovered hereafter by the philologist of the future. 2nd. The classification and simultaneous presentation of the allied words offer to the student of languages a means of ascertaining the oldest and most perfect form of a word as it exists in Polynesia. Comparisons have been separately attempted betwe...