University of Hawai'i Press
  • Comparisons of Moriori, Maori, and Easter Island Cognates

All the surviving 1,200 words from the extinct Moriori language were compared with Maori and Rapanui languages. A Moriori speaker would have understood much said by an Easter Islander as their languages shared at least one word in five, or over 20%, and probably shared many more.

Keywords

Moriori, Maori, Rapanui cognates

The Chatham Islands lie at the southwestern corner of the Polynesian triangle, of which Easter Island is the eastern corner. The first humans to reach the Chatham Islands arrived apparently before A.D. 1500 and settled on Pitt Island. Sometime later three storm-driven double-canoes brought more East Polynesian settlers. They arrived well equipped but without any pigs, dogs, or chickens, and without plant foods that would grow in a climate which is cool and wet, but by no means sub-Antarctic.

No further canoes or people arrived until HMS Chatham in 1791 and 900 Maori invaders on the Lord Rodney in 1835. So the descendants of the original East Polynesian settlers, now called Moriori, had more than 300 years in complete isolation. Unfortunately, their language was overwhelmed by the invaders, was seldom in use by 1875, and became extinct soon after 1926. No grammar remains but a list of 1026 words was published by Deighton in 1887 and about 70 more survive in the writings of Shand 1911, Baucke 1928, and others. Thus only about 1200 words survive.

About a third of all known Moriori words are identical in Maori with much the same meanings. Maori and Moriori could understand each other, but Moriori had a guttural diction, a consistent suppression of terminal vowels and some other sound changes. Few if any of the dominant Maori bothered to learn the language of the enslaved Moriori.

In 1919 using Deighton's list and material from Shand which is now lost, H.W. Williams wrote that the "Moriori language appears to be further removed from Maori than the dialects of many of the islands of the Pacific. Peculiarities of both grammar and vocabulary make the language more difficult for one conversant with Maori to read than Rarotongan, and not less so than that of Tahiti, Uvea or Niue. Structurally the [language] is exceedingly plastic, and affords examples of letter change in bewildering variety. In some cases the metamorphosed word has wholly displaced the form with which we are familiar in Maori: in others the Maori form is used concurrently with one or more variant [End Page 38] forms. This may in some cases be a survival . . . .." or a sign of more recent changes (Williams 1919:417).

Clark has since shown that in the case of the articles at least, the changes are not haphazard but conform with regularity in accord with the form of related words, or for euphony, etc. Clark noted that "while certain features of the definite article system have parallels in other Polynesian languages, nothing exactly like it exists in Maori or anywhere else" (Clark 2000:24).

There seems room to look further at Moriori to see how it can be related more closely to any of the other languages in the East Polynesian group. Shand wrote to Percy Smith, his guide, that he "was surprised to notice how many Moriori words in the Marquesan dialect, such as tohua for open space, mahu for much or numerous, and taua for war . . . It seems marvelous that separated as they have been for so long, they still retain so many words in common" (Shand Letter September, 23 1893). Smith, who had been the first surveyor on Chatham Island in 1868, later noted that the "tch" sound among the Moriori was also present on Tongareva (Penrhyn) in the northern Cook Islands.

In 1994, Clark calculated that the relationship between Maori and other East Polynesian languages were from 53 to 57% for the southern Cook Island dialects and 54% for Rapanui. Evidently, the linguistic links between them and Moriori would be lower and perhaps older. Rarotonga may still be regarded locally as probably the last homeplace of the Maori who immigrated to New Zealand, while the Moriori came from somewhere else, perhaps from the Austral Islands south of Tahiti.

So little Moriori survives, just over 1200 words, compared with over 1500 old Maori words and about 4300 from Easter Island. It seemed best to begin with a comparison of cognates with columns headed English, Maori, Moriori, and Rapanui. Unfortunately, the search for a comparable word list for the old language of Easter Island also encountered frustrating limitations. The main source used was the Dictionary and Grammar of the Easter Island Language by Fuentes in 1960. "The Easter Island Entries in POLLEXOnline" was also consulted but many words there were unavailable in Moriori or were otherwise unsuitable. A third source was Manahi Pakarati, a mother tongue Rapanui speaker, and her friends.

The comparative lists of almost 800 comparisons covers 24 pages in the newly published book, Moriori: Origins, Lifestyles and Language (Richards 2018). From the 1026 words collected by Deighton, there were 185 triple cognates, 330 related words, and 511 words for which no relationships were noted. From the additional 174 Moriori words, there were 78 more triple cognates (i.e., the same or closely similar in the Moriori, Maori, and Rapanui languages).

Further lists were made using 257 words from Old Rurutu provided by Mrs. Elin Teuruaraii of Teautamatea Marae on Rurutu in the Austral Islands. These were listed in columns to show French, English, Maori and Moriori, and Old Rurutuan comparisons. There were 129 cognates with Moriori, or about 50%. This suggests to me that more attention could be given to Rurutu as a possible homeplace of the early East Polynesians who went to the Chatham Islands and became the Moriori.

A caveat needs to be recorded however on these preliminary results. Steven Fischer pointed out that both the Rapanui sources (POLLEX and Fuentes) are unreliable, modern, and not historical. "Hence the word list for Rapanui includes many Tahitian lexemes . . . . that now amount to 40 to 50 percent of the lexicon. At least 30 percent of the entries seem to be relatively recent Tahitian borrowings (i.e., since the 1880s) and usually given without their proper glottal stops" (Fischer pers. comm. October 2016). These criticisms are of [End Page 39] course entirely valid for the Rapanui material, and also for the Rurutu material. However, my intention has only been to provide an indicative list, not a statistical or pure conclusion. What has been done, at considerable length, is not a final word. Rather it is an encouragement and invitation for someone far more expert than me to widen the focus to include more than just the Cook Islands as the likely last home of the Moriori ancestors, and to show more clearly their earlier common ancestry with the East Polynesians who reached Easter Island.

Conclusion

Apart from differences in pronunciation, which were considerable, a Moriori speaker would have understood a Maori speaker well since over 70% of their words were identical or close cognates. A Moriori speaker would have understood much said by a Rapanui speaker as their languages shared over one in five words, or over 20%, and probably shared many more. For example, among 76 words recorded by Deighton, 29 were shared by Moriori and Maori, 25 were shared by Maori and Rapanui, and 22 (or 29%) were shared by Moriori and Rapanui. (This conforms with the anecdotal story that at the first Pacific Arts Festival held at Rotorua in 1976, the Easter Island delegation dispensed with Spanish translation, finding it better to listen to the Maori, especially to the Arawa dialect).

Similarities in Moriori and Rapanui material culture have been recognized for a century, and very close similarities have been noted in their customs such as their bird cults and birding expeditions to off-shore islands. The survival of so much of the vocabulary separately over the centuries, across the oceans between the eastern and southernmost islands of Polynesia, is certainly remarkable. Studies that compare the retention of links between the languages of the original settlers on the outer edges of East Polynesia deserve more attention. [End Page 40]

Rhys Richards
Paremata, Porirua, New Zealand

References

Baucke, W. 1928. The Morioris. Memoir of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum. Honolulu. vol. IX, no.5. (with Skinner H.D.).
Clark, R. 2000. The Definite Article and the Authenticity of Moriori. Rongorongo Studies. Auckland. vol. 10. 13–26.
Deighton, S. 1887. A Moriori Vocabulary. Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives. Wellington. vol. II, G-5, 1–7.
Richards, R. 2018. Moriori: Origins, Lifestyles and Language. Paremata Press. Porirua, Wellington. (parematapress@gmail.com).
Shand, A. 1893. Letter to S. Percy Smith, 23 September 1893. Alexander Turnbull Library. Wellington.
Shand, A. 1911. The Moriori Peoples of the Chatham Islands. Memoir of the Polynesian Society. vol. 2.
Williams, H.W. 1919. Some Notes on the Language of the Chatham Islands. Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute. Wellington. vol. 51. pp. 415–422.

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