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Frank says:
> Additionally, I think poultry everywhere should be outraged at this clear
> insult to their navigational skills. Who says they needed a human,
> Polynesian or otherwise, to carry them to America.

Go Frank! Maybe the great storm plucked up this unfortunate chook from
where it was peacefully pecking about on its island home and blew it
all the way to South America. Why would it need a boat?

> ... But
> clearly they had no lasting impact. There are no Polynesian dialects spoken
> along the coast of South America. There are no Polynesian cultural
> artifacts. It's quite different from every other place where the Polynesians
> established themselves.

I take your general point. There is no evidence of an enduring colony;
either in South America or other inhabited places in the Pacific the
Polynesians may well have visited. Of course, those places that had
established populations (unlike Hawaii and New Zealand) may have
simply absorbed the newcomers, or by other means effectively resisted
colonisation. After enjoying the delivered takeout chicken.

However, as an example of how this may not be the whole story, there
is a paradise in the Pacific for linguists, known since independence
in 1980 as Vanuatu.

(Formerly the shared English/French colony called the New Hebrides.
This bizarre colonial arrangement was known as the condominium, but
referred to locally as the pandemonium. Relative heights from which
the competing national flags were flown was one of the more serious
ongoing issues there, I've heard.)

A paradise for linguists because there are so many languages there
(three national languages alone) and these are not just regional
dialects, but also representatives of quite different language
families. For example, one local language is a corrupted form of Malay
(the lingua franca for an extended area well to the north west) while
another is reasonably pure Polynesian. Generally speaking the people
of Vanuatu are Melanesian, but there is considerable blurring between
the Melanesian and Polynesian worlds in the Pacific. The further east;
the more Polynesian, the further west; the more Melanesian. There are
no 'pure' races, but in broad terms the folk from New Guinea seem to
be 'pure' Melanesian, from the Marquesas 'pure' Polynesian. In Fiji
the locals seem to be a mixture of both, although Fiji notionally
forms part of the Melanesian world.

So is there evidence for colonisation of the place in Vanuatu where a
reasonably uncorrupted Polynesian dialect is spoken? It would seem so.
If Polynesians were settled in Vanuatu it is reasonable to assume they
were also in, or had access to New Caledonia (just to the south) and
the Solomon Islands (just to the north) and New Guinea (north west) as
all these places consist of archipelagos of islands, little separated
by open ocean. Just as the north eastern tip of Australia is only
separated from New Guinea by a shallow sea studded with islands and
inhabited by Melanesians.

Went looking for online sites about this, but all I've come up with quickly is
http://www.vanuatu.usp.ac.fj/paclangunit/English_South_Pacific.htm
which is mainly about English in the South Pacific, although there is
some information there about local languages, and its not a bad
introduction to the linguistic story of this area.

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