History of Polynesian Languages
نویسنده
چکیده
We have been using the term “Polynesian languages” implying that these languages belong in a single group and that they are somehow related. But what does it mean to say that languages are related? What is the basis for the assumption that, say, Hawaiian and Samoan are related? There are two major methods that are relevant to these questions: the comparative method and lexicostatistics. The comparative method is a general tool that can be used to determine linguistic relationship, to reconstruct proto-languages, and to determine the subgrouping relationships within a language family based on evidence of exclusively shared innovations. Lexicostatistics provides an alternative method for subgrouping which is in many ways easier to use, but which suffers from drawbacks which will be discussed later in this chapter. In this chapter, we will discuss these two methods and see how we can reach the conclusion that the languages we refer to as Polynesian languages are indeed related to each other. Studying the relation between these languages is in a sense reconstructing the past of their speakers. Where did they come from? How did they end up scattered across such a wide area? How did they end up speaking different languages? As we will see in this chapter, linguistic evidence can indeed tell us quite a lot about the history of the Polynesian-speaking people.
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