What is "melanesian"

Usage examples of "melanesian".

Melanesian languages belong to the one large language group: the Austronesian language family of which the Polynesian languages all constitute one subgroup.

The area of agreement is that the Polynesian languages are related more closely to some Melanesian languages than to the Micronesian languages, and that all belong to the great Austronesian language group.

The Fijian rites of initiation seem to have been imported by Melanesian immigrants from the west.

By Fijian custom the lives of all castaways were forfeit, but the pretence to supernatural powers would have saved men full of the religious rites of their Melanesian home, and would have assured them a hearing.

Grace, recently argued that the Fijian, Polynesian and Rotuman languages derive from a common ancestral language which had itself come from Melanesian islands west of Fiji.

The most vexing problem is to find, for example, the names of those who composed Han dynasty music, cast Benin bronzes, carved Kwakiutl totem poles and compiled Melanesian folk epics.

Perhaps some twenty-first-century lexicologist, studying the Russell Islands dialect of Melanesian, will stumble on those terms and remember the months when the Russells were on the outskirts of a war and Americans drifted up on the beaches and dangled down from the sky under nylon canopies.

Melanesians applies to the natives of New Britain and more particularly of the neighbouring Duke of York islands.

Cheyne, indeed, a veteran of the Melanesian sandalwood trade, was killed on Palau in 1866 after a decade of failed commercial undertakings.

More importantly, it gave perhaps 100,000 Melanesians direct, personal experience of life in European frontier-settlements: perhaps half of them in Queensland, about 20,000 in Fiji, and the remainder recruited by French and German agents for work in New Caledonia, Samoa and New Guinea.

Was he Melanesian, Polynesian, Indonesian, Nepalese, Surinamese, Dutch-Chinese?

A number of archaeologists have concluded that the tanging of adzes was brought to Polynesia by migrants from the west, although tanging is not typical of Western Polynesian, Melanesian or Micronesian adzes.

Polynesian languages and cultures far to the west of Polynesia, in the eastern sector of the Melanesian islands: Tikopia, Anuta, Rennell, Bellona, Stewart, Ontong Java, the Duffs, and numbers of others.

From a point some miles to the north of Finsch Harbour as far as Samoa Harbour on Huon Gulf the coast is inhabited by two kindred tribes, the Yabim and the Bukaua, who speak a Melanesian language.

The language which the Bukaua speak belongs, like the language of the Yabim, to the Melanesian, not to the Papuan family.