Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Tahitian language
Summary
Tahitian (Tahitian: Reo Tahiti, part of Reo Māohi, languages of French Polynesia) is a Polynesian language, spoken mainly on the Society Islands in French Polynesia. It belongs to the Eastern Polynesian group.
As Tahitian had no written tradition before the arrival of the Western colonists, the spoken language was first transcribed by missionaries of the London Missionary Society in the early 19th century.
Tahitian is the most prominent of the indigenous Polynesian languages spoken in French Polynesia (reo māohi). The latter also include:
Marquesan, spoken by about 8,000 people in the Marquesas Islands, with two sub-divisions, North-Western (eo enana) and South-Eastern (eo enata)
Paumotu (reo paumotu), spoken by about 4,000 people in the Tuamotu Islands
Austral, spoken by about 3,000 people in the Austral Islands
Rapa, spoken by about 400 people on Rapa Iti
Raivavae, spoken by about 900 people in the Austral Islands
Mangareva, spoken by about 600 people in the Gambier Islands
When Europeans first arrived in Tahiti at the end of the 18th century, there was no writing system and Tahitian was only a spoken language. Reports by some early European explorers including Quirós include attempts to transcribe notable Tahitian words heard during initial interactions with the indigenous people of Marquesa. Aboard the Endeavour, Lt. James Cook and the ship's master, Robert Molyneux, transcribed the names of 72 and 55 islands respectively as recited by the Tahitian arioi, Tupaia. Many of these were "non-geographic" or "ghost islands" of Polynesian mythology and all were transcribed using phonetic English spelling. In 1797, Protestant missionaries arrived in Tahiti on a British ship called Duff, captained by James Wilson. Among the missionaries was Henry Nott (1774–1844) who learned the Tahitian language and worked with Pōmare II, a Tahitian king, and the Welsh missionary, John Davies (1772–1855), to translate the Bible into Tahitian. A system of five vowels and nine consonants was adopted for the Tahitian Bible, which would become the key text by which many Polynesians would learn to read and write.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.