MAORIS AND ESKIMOS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVII, Issue 147, 23 June 1926, Page 14

MAORIS AND ESKIMOS.

■Td the Editor .vir.-j-Tfrur correspondent. \ Hnrrie ;rives an interestinc comparison of 1 and Eskimo greetings, but these do not < evidence relationship. All speech, it is i believed, passes through similar stares :of growth and development. From the 1 i;Ti;iii> and monosyllables of tlie dawn of I speech language seems to. follow a well i defined path, emerging from the simplest I forms to Income agglutinative (the .joining together of wordsi. tiien in- ! flexions 1 :Latin and early Anglo-Saxon •are examples;, finally analytic. It is j net • possible id tell when n lflngTiapf j ceases to be of one sort and blends into the other. There is a slow merging in the gradual upgrowth of speech. However distant or isolated folk such as the ] Maori i?eod to preserve archaic forms of speech, and of this class is the singular, dual and plural of address auoted by Mr. Harrie. It was a definite ancient form Tlip.t probably ha-d its rise •when the family was the human unit and I stranger? %a ere rare and suspicious char- ! seters. It is still used among survivals "1 nf this type. Dotably the Ficno-Ugri:' I triiies of the Siberian seaboard, and in.----j plies not kinship, but a similar stpgv lof speech grrotrth. arrested by a continuance of the conditions that jrave birth to the form. The Eskimo, i* :* generally held, came from :he interior jof Korth America, and their speech I belong to the Athbascan group of the three main Kortli American families, tlie other groups being the Algonquin and another il forget the group title i pomprisiri" the speech of the more ferocious Tribe--. I such as Apaches. C-oaiauches and the i Aztecs, overthrown by Cortez. The j Athabascans include ihe West Coß?t I Indians. aiDongst nhoffl Dr. Rhet found over 100 concordances «ilh Polynesian. I Therefore, while the forme of address quoted by your correspondent only indicates the survival, by reason of isolation. !of a general and now archaic form, "his I guess of "some obscure relationship"— j extrem<-jy remote, however—may not Ibe so very tride of the target. —I am. , ietc. FRANK hTbODLE.