Internal Relationships of Polynesian Languages and Dialects

T HE OBJECTS of this study have been to develop precise techniques for the application of a glottochronological method to Polynesia, and to discover something about the interrelationship of twenty Polynesian languages or dialects.2 The glottochronological method of counting likenesses in basic vocabularies of related languages, and thus computing relative nearness and farness of these languages with reference to a reconstructed proto-ancestral language, was proposed and applied by Morris Swadesh in several articles.3 Several years previously Emory4 had independently evolved a technique of language comparison based on the same fundamental principle, namely that over long periods of time, languages tend to change at a relatively even rate. Emory, however, based his comparisons on total vocabulary rather than on basic vocabulary. He compared vocabularies of nine Polynesian languages and determined the number of cognates shared or partially shared by the nine languages, as well as the number of cognates uniquely shared by pairs of languages. The total num-