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79-677: The Polynesian languages form a genealogical group of languages , itself part of the Oceanic branch of the Austronesian family . There are 38 Polynesian languages, representing 7 percent of the 522 Oceanic languages, and 3 percent of the Austronesian family. While half of them are spoken in geographical Polynesia (the Polynesian triangle ), the other half – known as Polynesian outliers – are spoken in other parts of
158-474: A Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family. Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates , essentially language families consisting of
237-455: A unicameral consonant letter used within the Latin script to mark the phonemic glottal stop . It is also used in many other Polynesian languages, each of which has its own name for the character. Apart from the ʻokina or the somewhat similar Tahitian ʻeta, a common method is to change the simple apostrophe for a curly one, taking a normal apostrophe for the elision and the inverted comma for
316-530: A difference in meaning. One example is the Samoan word susu , which takes the o-possessive in lona susu (her breast) and the a-possessive in lana susu (her breastmilk). Compare also the particles used in the names of two of the books of the Māori Bible: Te Pukapuka a Heremaia (The Book of Jeremiah) with Te Pukapuka o Hōhua (The Book of Joshua); the former belongs to Jeremiah in
395-509: A linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic , Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family. The concept of language families
474-416: A long vowel, while a vowel without that diacritical mark is short, for example, ā versus a . Sometimes, a long vowel is instead written double, e.g. Maaori . The glottal stop (not present in all Polynesian languages, but, where present, one of the most common consonants ) is indicated by an apostrophe , for example, 'a versus a . Hawaiʻian uses the ʻokina , also called by several other names ,
553-404: A natural development, as /tʃ/ in many Polynesian languages derived from Proto-Polynesian /ti/ . /l/ may also be heard as an alveolar flap sound [ ɺ ] . Although the acute accent has been available on most personal computers from their early days onwards, when Tongan newspapers started to use computers around 1990 to produce their papers, they were unable to find, or failed to enter,
632-426: A number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another, even if this family's relation to other families is not known. Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for
711-488: A significant degree of understanding of each other's speech. When a particular language shows unexpectedly large divergence in vocabulary, this may be the result of a name-avoidance taboo situation – see examples in Tahitian , where this has happened often. Many Polynesian languages have been greatly affected by European colonization. Both Māori and Hawaiian, for example, have lost many speakers to English , and only since
790-427: A single language and have no single ancestor. Isolates are languages that cannot be proven to be genealogically related to any other modern language. As a corollary, every language isolate also forms its own language family — a genetic family which happens to consist of just one language. One often cited example is Basque , which forms a language family on its own; but there are many other examples outside Europe. On
869-512: A single language. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family , for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within
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#1732790472699948-462: A single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today. An example is Basque . In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them. A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship
1027-447: A sufficiently wide meaning to the word 'impress', we may say, perhaps, that ʻeku is used in reference to things upon which I impress myself, while hoku is used in reference to things which impress themselves upon me. ʻE possessives are generally used for: Ho possessives are generally used for There are plenty of exceptions which do not fall under the guidelines above, for instance, ʻeku tamai , "my father". The number of exceptions
1106-484: A three-level definiteness distinction: There are three registers which consist of There are also further distinctions between For example, the phrase "Come and eat!" translates to: The Tongan language distinguishes three numbers : singular, dual , and plural . They appear as the three major columns in the tables below. The Tongan language distinguishes four persons: First person exclusive , first person inclusive , second person and third person. They appear as
1185-475: A verb? What, for example, is the rule or the guiding principle, which lies behind the fact that a Tongan says ʻeku paʻanga for ' my money' but hoku fale for 'my house'? It may be stated as follows: the use of ʻeku for 'my' implies that I am active, influential, or formative, &c., towards the thing mentioned, whereas the use of hoku for 'my' implies that the thing mentioned is active, influential, or formative, &c., towards me. Or, provided that we give
1264-487: Is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian subcontinent . Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with
1343-483: Is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language. The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods. Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take
1422-452: Is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language , spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In
1501-543: Is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects , which over time may diverge into distinct languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than familiar biological ancestry, in which species do not crossbreed. It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer . Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact , which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages . In addition,
1580-533: Is found with any other known language. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier . For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language
1659-459: Is large enough to make the alienable and inalienable distinction appear on the surface to be as arbitrary as the grammatical gender distinction for Romance languages, but by and large the above guidelines hold true. The cardinal pronouns are the main personal pronouns which in Tongan can either be preposed (before the verb , light colour) or postposed (after the verb, dark colour). The first are
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#17327904726991738-412: Is less apt when used on nouns. Indeed, in most contexts hoku taki would be interpreted as "my leader", as a noun rather than a verb. What then of nouns that have no real verb interpretation, such as fale "house"? Churchward himself laid out the distinction thus: But what about those innumerable cases in which the possessive can hardly be said to correspond either to the subject or to the object of
1817-400: Is no upper bound to the number of languages a family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages , contain over 1000. Language families can be identified from shared characteristics amongst languages. Sound changes are one of the strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through
1896-637: Is not a measure of) a genetic relationship between the languages concerned. Linguistic interference can occur between languages that are genetically closely related, between languages that are distantly related (like English and French, which are distantly related Indo-European languages ) and between languages that have no genetic relationship. Some exceptions to the simple genetic relationship model of languages include language isolates and mixed , pidgin and creole languages . Mixed languages, pidgins and creole languages constitute special genetic types of languages. They do not descend linearly or directly from
1975-451: Is not attested by written records and so is conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing. A common visual representation of a language family is given by a genetic language tree. The tree model is sometimes termed a dendrogram or phylogeny . The family tree shows the relationship of the languages within a family, much as a family tree of an individual shows their relationship with their relatives. There are criticisms to
2054-446: Is part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia , all believed to have descended from a common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European . A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although language isolates — languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families that contain one language. Inversely, there
2133-422: Is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method , a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher . This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families . For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Indo-European
2212-686: Is primarily a spoken, rather than written, language. One of the first publications of Tongan texts was in William Mariner 's grammar and dictionary of the Tongan language, edited and published in 1817 by John Martin as part of volume 2 of Mariner's Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, in the South Pacific Ocean . Orthography has changed since Mariner's time. An annotated list of dictionaries and vocabularies of
2291-465: The North Germanic language family, including Danish , Swedish , Norwegian and Icelandic , which have shared descent from Ancient Norse . Latin and ancient Norse are both attested in written records, as are many intermediate stages between those ancestral languages and their modern descendants. In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance,
2370-674: The comparative method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change through language contact which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example, the Mongolic , Tungusic , and Turkic languages share a great deal of similarities that lead several scholars to believe they were related . These supposed relationships were later discovered to be derived through language contact and thus they are not truly related. Eventually though, high amounts of language contact and inconsistent changes will render it essentially impossible to derive any more relationships; even
2449-489: The comparative method of linguistic analysis. In order to test the hypothesis that two languages are related, the comparative method begins with the collection of pairs of words that are hypothesized to be cognates : i.e., words in related languages that are derived from the same word in the shared ancestral language. Pairs of words that have similar pronunciations and meanings in the two languages are often good candidates for hypothetical cognates. The researcher must rule out
Polynesian languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
2528-638: The daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related . The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of the proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time. One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages , including Spanish , French , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , Catalan , and many others, all of which are descended from Vulgar Latin . The Romance family itself
2607-547: The glottal stop . The latter method has come into common use in Polynesian languages. Language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree , or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy . Linguists thus describe
2686-418: The 'full-style' and 'telephone-style' numbers are in equally common use, while for other two-digit numbers the 'telephone-style' numbers are almost exclusively in use: ʻOku fiha ia? (how much (does it cost)?) Paʻanga ʻe ua-nima-noa (T$ 2.50) In addition there are special, traditional counting systems for fish, coconuts, yams, etc. (Cf. Classifier (linguistics) .) Tongan has a very rich oral literature and
2765-727: The 1990s have they resurged in popularity. In general, Polynesian languages have three numbers for pronouns and possessives: singular, dual and plural. For example, in Māori: ia (he/she), rāua (they two), rātou (they 3 or more). The words rua (2) and toru (3) are still discernible in endings of the dual and plural pronouns, giving the impression that the plural was originally a trial (threesome) or paucal (a few), and that an original plural has disappeared. Polynesian languages have four distinctions in pronouns and possessives: first exclusive, first inclusive, second and third. For example, in Māori,
2844-549: The Austronesian languages, along with Hawaiian , Māori , Samoan and Tahitian , for example. Together with Niuean , it forms the Tongic subgroup of Polynesian. Tongan is unusual among Polynesian languages in that it has a so-called definitive accent . As with all Polynesian languages, Tongan has adapted the phonological system of proto-Polynesian. Tongan has heavily influenced the Wallisian language after Tongans colonized
2923-472: The East Polynesian languages were more closely related to Samoan than they were to Tongan, calling Tongan and its nearby relative Niuean "Tongic" and Samoan and all other Polynesian languages of the study "Nuclear Polynesian". Previously, there had been lexicostatistical studies that squarely suggested a "West Polynesian" group composed of at least Tongan and Samoan and that an "East Polynesian" group
3002-484: The East Polynesian tree, further study paused for almost twenty years until Wilson published a study of Polynesian pronominal systems in 1985 suggesting that there was a special relationship between the East Polynesian languages and all other Nuclear Polynesian but for Futunic, and calling that extra-Futunic group the " Ellicean languages ". Furthermore, East Polynesian was found to more likely have emerged from extra-Samoan Ellicean than out of Samoa itself, in contradiction to
3081-518: The Māori sounds /k/ , /ɾ/ , /t/ , and /ŋ/ correspond to /ʔ/ , /l/ , /k/ , and /n/ in Hawaiian. Accordingly, "man" is tangata in Māori and kanaka in Hawaiian, and Māori roa "long" corresponds to Hawaiian loa . The famous Hawaiian greeting aloha corresponds to Māori aroha , "love, tender emotion". Similarly, the Hawaiian word for kava is ʻawa . Similarities in basic vocabulary may allow speakers from different island groups to achieve
3160-758: The Pacific: from Micronesia to atolls scattered in Papua New Guinea , the Solomon Islands or Vanuatu . The most prominent Polynesian languages, by number of speakers, are Samoan , Tongan , Tahitian , Māori and Hawaiian . The ancestors of modern Polynesians were Lapita navigators , who settled in the Tonga and Samoa areas about 3,000 years ago. Linguists and archaeologists estimate that this first population went through common development during about 1000 years, giving rise to Proto-Polynesian ,
3239-630: The Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family , since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European ; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives. In cases such as these, genetic relationships are established through use of
Polynesian languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
3318-599: The Tonga telephone directory for years now ignores all rules. ) The original j , used for /tʃ/ , disappeared in the beginning of the 20th century, merging with /s/ . By 1943, j was no longer used. Consequently, many words written with s in Tongan are cognate to those with t in other Polynesian languages. For example, Masisi (a star name) in Tongan is cognate with Matiti in Tokelauan ; siale ( Gardenia taitensis) in Tongan and tiare in Tahitian . This seems to be
3397-598: The Tongan language is available at the website of the Bibliographical Society of America under the resource heading 'Breon Mitchell": . The Bible and the Book of Mormon were translated into Tongan and few other books were written in it. There are several weekly and monthly magazines in Tongan, but there are no daily newspapers. Weekly newspapers, some of them twice per week: Monthly or two-monthly papers, mostly church publications: The Tongan calendar
3476-496: The common ancestor of the Germanic subfamily, was itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-European , the common ancestor of the Indo-European family. Within a large family, subfamilies can be identified through "shared innovations": members of a subfamily will share features that represent retentions from their more recent common ancestor, but were not present in the overall proto-language of the larger family. Some taxonomists restrict
3555-563: The family tree model. Critics focus mainly on the claim that the internal structure of the trees is subject to variation based on the criteria of classification. Even among those who support the family tree model, there are debates over which languages should be included in a language family. For example, within the dubious Altaic language family , there are debates over whether the Japonic and Koreanic languages should be included or not. The wave model has been proposed as an alternative to
3634-415: The family. The largest five language families in terms of number of speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Austronesian) make up five-sixths (almost 83.3%) of the world’s population. Two languages have a genetic relationship , and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor through the process of language change , or one is descended from
3713-415: The family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade . Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, sometimes referred to as "branches" or "subfamilies" of the family; for instance, the Germanic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European family. Subfamilies share a more recent common ancestor than the common ancestor of the larger family; Proto-Germanic ,
3792-495: The following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world: Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than sign languages , pidgins , and unclassifiable languages ): Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect; for example Lyle Campbell counts only 27 Otomanguean languages, although he, Ethnologue and Glottolog also disagree as to which languages belong in
3871-468: The form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic , the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as
3950-612: The four major rows in the tables below. This gives us 12 main groups. In addition, possessive pronouns are either alienable (reddish) or inalienable (greenish), which Churchward termed subjective and objective . This marks a distinction that has been referred to, in some analyses of other Polynesian languages , as a-possession versus o-possession , respectively, though more Tongan-appropriate version would be ʻe-possession and ho-possession . Subjective and objective are fitting labels when dealing with verbs: ʻeku taki "my leading" vs. hoku taki "my being led". However, this
4029-503: The global scale, the site Glottolog counts a total of 423 language families in the world, including 184 isolates. One controversial theory concerning the genetic relationships among languages is monogenesis , the idea that all known languages, with the exceptions of creoles , pidgins and sign languages , are descendant from a single ancestral language. If that is true, it would mean all languages (other than pidgins, creoles, and sign languages) are genetically related, but in many cases,
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#17327904726994108-647: The island of ʻUvea in the 15th and 16th centuries. The earliest attempts to transcribe the Tongan language were made by Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire of the Dutch East India Company when they first arrived in 1616. They transcribed a limited number of nouns and verbs using phonetic Dutch spelling and added them to a growing list of Polynesian vocabulary. Abel Tasman , also of the Dutch East India Company , attempted to converse with indigenous Tongans using vocabulary from this list when he arrived on Tongatapu on 20 January 1643, although he
4187-542: The language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages ( Latin , Oscan , Umbrian , etc.) might well be " areal features ". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not
4266-444: The latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family. A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language (not to be confused with a mother tongue ) being the root from which all languages in the family stem. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it
4345-829: The linguistic ancestor of all modern Polynesian languages. After that period of shared development, the Proto-Polynesian society split into several descendant populations, as Polynesian navigators scattered around various archipelagoes across the Pacific – some travelling westwards to already populated areas , others navigating eastwards and settling in new territories ( Society Islands , Marquesas , Hawaii , New Zealand , Rapa Nui , etc.). Still today, Polynesian languages show strong similarity, particularly cognate words in their vocabulary; this includes culturally important words such as tapu , ariki , motu , fenua , kava , and tapa as well as * sawaiki ,
4424-505: The long assumption of a Samoan homeland for the origins of East Polynesian. Wilson named this new group "Ellicean" after the pre-independence name of Tuvalu and presented evidence for subgroups within that overarching category. Marck, in 2000, was able to offer some support for some aspects of Wilson's suggestion through comparisons of shared sporadic (irregular, unexpected) sound changes, e. g., Proto-Polynesian and Proto-Nuclear-Polynesian *mafu 'to heal' becoming Proto-Ellicean *mafo. This
4503-416: The missionaries, and the people had learned to read and write without marking vowel length or the glottal stop . This situation persists in many languages. Despite efforts at reform by local academies, the general conservative resistance to orthographic change has led to varying results in Polynesian languages, and several writing variants co-exist. The most common method, however, uses a macron to indicate
4582-558: The mythical homeland for some of the cultures. Polynesian languages fall into two branches, Tongic and Nuclear Polynesian . Tongan and Niuean constitute the Tongic branch; all the rest are part of the Nuclear Polynesian branch. The contemporary classification of the Polynesian languages began with certain observations by Andrew Pawley in 1966 based on shared innovations in phonology, vocabulary and grammar showing that
4661-563: The normal alienable possessive pronouns, the latter the stressed alienable pronouns, which are sometimes used as reflexive pronouns , or with kia te in front the inalienable possessive forms. (There is no possession involved in the cardinal pronouns and therefore no alienable or inalienable forms). Examples of use. Another archaic aspect of Tongan is the retention of preposed pronouns. They are used much less frequently in Samoan and have completely disappeared in East Polynesian languages, where
4740-423: The oldest demonstrable language family, Afroasiatic , is far younger than language itself. Estimates of the number of language families in the world may vary widely. According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including isolates. Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists
4819-507: The orthography of the Tongan language. However, C. M. Churchward's grammar and dictionary favoured the standard European alphabetical order, which, since his time, has been in use exclusively: Notes: The above order is strictly followed in proper dictionaries. Therefore, ngatu follows nusi , ʻa follows vunga and it also follows z if foreign words occur. Words with long vowels come directly after those with short vowels. Improper wordlists may or may not follow these rules. (For example,
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#17327904726994898-407: The other language. Tongan language Tongan (English pronunciation: / ˈ t ɒ ŋ ( ɡ ) ə n / TONG -(g)ən ; lea fakatonga ) is an Austronesian language of the Polynesian branch native to the island nation of Tonga . It has around 187,000 speakers. It uses the word order verb–subject–object . Tongan is one of the multiple languages in the Polynesian branch of
4977-454: The other. The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship . There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of
5056-958: The plural pronouns are: mātou (we, exc), tātou (we, inc), koutou (you), rātou (they). The difference between exclusive and inclusive is the treatment of the person addressed. Mātou refers to the speaker and others but not the person or persons spoken to (i.e., "I and some others, but not you"), while tātou refers to the speaker, the person or persons spoken to, and everyone else (i.e., "You and I and others"). Many Polynesian languages distinguish two possessives . The a-possessives (as they contain that letter in most cases), also known as subjective possessives, refer to possessions that must be acquired by one's own action ( alienable possession ). The o-possessives or objective possessives refer to possessions that are fixed to someone, unchangeable, and do not necessitate any action on one's part but upon which actions can still be performed by others ( inalienable possession ). Some words can take either form, often with
5135-470: The possibility that the two words are similar merely due to chance, or due to one having borrowed the words from the other (or from a language related to the other). Chance resemblance is ruled out by the existence of large collections of pairs of words between the two languages showing similar patterns of phonetic similarity. Once coincidental similarity and borrowing have been eliminated as possible explanations for similarities in sound and meaning of words,
5214-405: The pronouns are cognate with the Tongan postposed form minus ki- . (We love you: ʻOku ʻofa kimautolu kia te kimoutolu; Māori: e aroha nei mātou i a koutou). The possessives for every person and number (1st person plural, 3rd person dual, etc.) can be further divided into normal or ordinary (light colour), emotional (medium colour) and emphatic (bright colour) forms. The latter is rarely used, but
5293-452: The proper keystrokes, and it grew into a habit to put the accent after the vowel instead of on it: not á but a´ . But as this distance seemed to be too big, a demand arose for Tongan fonts where the acute accent was shifted to the right, a position halfway in between the two extremes above. Most papers still follow this practice. English uses only two articles : By contrast, Tongan has three articles, and possessives also have
5372-653: The purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgin . Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate
5451-536: The putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion). In some cases, the shared derivation of a group of related languages from a common ancestor is directly attested in the historical record. For example, this is the case for the Romance language family , wherein Spanish , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , and French are all descended from Latin, as well as for
5530-413: The relationships may be too remote to be detectable. Alternative explanations for some basic observed commonalities between languages include developmental theories, related to the biological development of the capacity for language as the child grows from newborn. A language family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all descendants of that ancestor are included in
5609-570: The remaining explanation is common origin: it is inferred that the similarities occurred due to descent from a common ancestor, and the words are actually cognates, implying the languages must be related. When languages are in contact with one another , either of them may influence the other through linguistic interference such as borrowing. For example, French has influenced English , Arabic has influenced Persian , Sanskrit has influenced Tamil , and Chinese has influenced Japanese in this way. However, such influence does not constitute (and
5688-610: The sense that he was the author, but the Book of Joshua was written by someone else about Joshua. The distinction between one's birth village and one's current residence village can be made similarly. Numerals: Written Polynesian languages use orthography based on Latin script . Most Polynesian languages have five vowel qualities , corresponding roughly to those written i, e, a, o, u in classical Latin . However, orthographic conventions for phonemes that are not easily encoded in standard Latin script had to develop over time. Influenced by
5767-426: The term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus on how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups , and groups into complexes . A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock . The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there
5846-482: The traditions of orthographies of languages they were familiar with, the missionaries who first developed orthographies for unwritten Polynesian languages did not explicitly mark phonemic vowel length or the glottal stop . By the time that linguists trained in more modern methods made their way to the Pacific, at least for the major languages, the Bible was already printed according to the orthographic system developed by
5925-502: The tree model. The wave model uses isoglosses to group language varieties; unlike in the tree model, these groups can overlap. While the tree model implies a lack of contact between languages after derivation from an ancestral form, the wave model emphasizes the relationship between languages that remain in contact, which is more realistic. Historical glottometry is an application of the wave model, meant to identify and evaluate genetic relations in linguistic linkages . A sprachbund
6004-497: The two former are common and further subdivided in definite (saturated colour) and indefinite (greyish colour) forms. Notes: Examples of use. These are the remainders: the pronominal adjectives (mine), indirect object pronouns or pronominal adverbs (for me) and the adverbial possessives (as me). Notes: Examples of use: In Tongan, "telephone-style" numerals can be used: reading numbers by simply saying their digits one by one. For 'simple' two-digit multiples of ten both
6083-484: Was equally distant from both Tongan and Samoan. Pawley published another study in 1967. It began the process of extracting relationships from Polynesian languages on small islands in Melanesia, the " Polynesian Outliers ", whose languages Pawley was able to trace to East Futuna in the case of those farther south and perhaps to Samoa itself in the case of those more to the north. Except for some minor differentiation of
6162-732: Was made possible by the massive Polynesian language comparative lexicon ("Pollex" – with reconstructions) of Biggs and Clark. Partly because Polynesian languages split from one another comparatively recently, many words in these languages remain similar to corresponding words in others. The table below demonstrates this with the words for 'sky', 'north wind', 'woman', 'house' and 'parent' in a representative selection of languages: Tongan ; Niuean ; Samoan ; Sikaiana ; Takuu ; North Marquesan ; South Marquesan ; Mangarevan ; Hawaiian ; Rapanui language ; Tahitian ; Māori and Cook Islands Māori (Rarotongan). Certain regular correspondences can be noted between different Polynesian languages. For example,
6241-462: Was poorly understood, likely using words added from different Polynesian languages. Tongan is presently written in a subset of the Latin script . In the old, "missionary" alphabet , the order of the letters was modified: the vowels were put first and then followed by the consonants : a, e, i, o, u, with variation of letter ā. That was still so as of the Privy Council decision of 1943 on
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