Reconstructions

Note

This complex term clearly referred to the direction of the wind (in sailing). In Proto-Polynesian the original morpheme boundary was lost and the adjacent low vowels fused into a single short vowel. The unanalyzable morpheme mataŋi then came to refer to the wind in general (although the reflex in Rennellese retains the original sense in addition to the general sense of ‘wind’). Niue mata mataŋi appears to be an attempt to restore the original sense of directionality by repeating mata ‘eye’ as an independent morpheme, since the original morphology has been lost, and with it the specifying property of *mata.