4 - 6 that there is a systematic correspondence between /t/ in
We see that no changes happened in the nasal consonants, nor in the
vowels, but we can observe in lines 2 and 3 that wherever Tongan and Maori
have /k/, Samoan, Tahitian and Hawai'ian appear to have /?/
(glottal stop). Apparently there has been an unconditioned change from
/k/ to /?/ in the Eastern branch, or a change from /k/ to /k/ in the Western branch of this family. We choose
the first as more likely, partly because /t/ is a more common phoneme
in the world's languages, partly because backing of consonants is more
common than fronting, and partly because of what we know about the culture
history: Polynesia was peopled from west to east, and if the change had
occurred in the Western branch, that would have been at a time when all
five languages were still one speech community. Next, we see in lines
4 - 6 that there is a systematic correspondence between /t/ in
the first four languages and /k/ in the easternmost, Hawai'ian.
This looks like another systematic, unconditioned sound change, this time
in only one language. (We can see from this example that when English
borrowed the Polynesian word for "forbidden", we borrowed it from one
of the languages west of Hawaii -- we say "taboo", not "kaboo").
This is what a family tree of the five Polynesian languages would look
like, based on the small data set above (the picture is somewhat more
complex when we look at other cognate sets -- Maori in particular is probably
not correctly placed in this diagram, which has been designed as an illustration
of the method):