Taxonomy of the Polynesian Languages

Various authors have presented indices of lexical similarity (proportion of homosemantic cognates of a base list) and incomplete hypotheses about the historical relationships between Polynesian languages. For both, dendrograms ("tree" diagrams) have been used. Available techniques have not been utilized for replicably generating dendrograms from similarity data, nor has synchronic taxonomy been distinguished from diachronic phylogeny. The canonical pictures of taxonomic similarity among 30 Polynesian languages are presented, certain defects of the dendrogram are discussed, and preference for smallest-space analysis as a pictorial representation of similarity data is expressed. Predictions are made of the similarities of several pairs of hitherto uncompared languages. Understanding of Polynesian prehistory has been impeded by uncritical inference from taxonomic dendrograms to phylogenetic family trees, and by lack of attention to formal models of historical process. Rough outlines of alternative models giving due attention to historical process are presented.