Edward Tregear’s The Maori-Polynesian Comparative Dictionary

Record summary

Edward Tregear’s 1891 comparative dictionary assembled Māori and Polynesian words, names, religious concepts, and mythological references, including terminology associated with gods, spirits, death, and cosmological places. It is a specific nineteenth-century artefact for investigating how Pacific sacred-language parallels were constructed during the period of comparative philology. The dictionary may help locate variants of underworld or celestial-journey vocabulary, but it should not be treated as proof that similar words imply identical beliefs. Tregear’s comparisons and etymologies have often been revised by later Pacific linguists and historians.