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Te Ao Hou, 1970, Page 4

The Editor, ‘Te Ao Hou’ Dear Sir, I congratulate Mr Bokalamulla on his article ‘Greetings from Lanka’ and Te Ao Hou for publishing it. The essay is one more indication that it has become obvious to the unprejudiced eye of more and more people that the Polynesian culture is not ‘homegrown’ on the individual islands of the Pacific but has been carried in migrations over vast stretches of time and place from other culture centres. As far as languages are concerned this principle has been accepted in the form of Grimm's Law of sound shifts and nobody is amazed that. e.g., Celtic in the far West is a relation of Sanskrit in distant India, and it can be proven by certain regular sound-changes in these related languages, that they all represent variations of some original parent language. In many Polynesian institutions, ideas, tales, myths and the names of their heroes, the origin can be traced to Sanskrit languages and, further and outside Sanskrit, to the Middle East. For India was only one of the many ‘Hawaiki’ and there are quite a number of names for stars in the Maori Calendar which go back to the Middle East. E.g., PAREARAU = Jupiter, one of the food stars of the Maori, can be equated to the Babylonian fertility god BAL or BEL ELAUHIM or Elohim. PAREARAU BALE LAU (him) L and R are interchangeable. B becomes P in Maori. Once again I wish to express my appreciation for the tolerant editorial policy of Te Ao Hou which allows space to a school of thought now out of fashion, but traceable over a century. I am convinced that co-operating teams of researchers across the Pacific, India and the Middle East would prove the correctness of this line of reasoning. Adele Schafer