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Updated: July 25, 2025
Or, there being a story to the effect that the first cocoanut grew out of the head of the metamorphosed Tuna, the kernel was called his brains. But why was the story told, and why of Tuna? Tuna was an eel, and women may not eat eels; and Ina was the moon, who, a Mangaian Selene, loved no Latmian shepherd, but an eel. Seriously, I fail to understand Mr. Max Muller's explanation.
It leads us to imagine that we have learnt something, when we really are as ignorant as before. 'If Mr. A. Lang had studied the Mangaian dialect, or consulted scholars like the Rev. W. W. Gill it is from his "Myths and Songs from the South Pacific" that he quotes the story of Tuna he would have seen that there is no similarity whatever between the stories of Daphne and of Tuna.
A most remarkable coincidence with the description of Tuoni's beer occurs in a curious story told on one of the Hervey Islands, concerning a Mangaian Dante. Being apparently near death, this man directed that, as soon as the breath was out of his body, a cocoa-nut should be cracked, and its kernel disengaged from the shell and placed upon his stomach under the grave-clothes.
Max Muller's theory of Daphne. But I never hinted that the isolated Mangaian story of Tuna, or the stories of plants sprung from mangled men, 'accounted, by themselves, 'for the story of Daphne. Mr. That I explained the myth of Daphne by the myth of Tuna? But that is precisely what I did not do.
Of the lost state of the dead, from the lurid Mangaian legend, in which infernal deities hocus and destroy the souls of all, to the various submarine and aerial limbos where the dead feast, float idle, or resume the occupations of their life on earth, it would be wearisome to tell.
The Tuna story is described as 'a clear case of disease of language cured by the ordinary nostrum of folk-etymology. The 'disease' showed itself, I suppose, in the presence of the Mangaian words for 'brain of Tuna. But the story of Tuna gives no folk-etymology of the name Tuna. Now, to give an etymology of a name of forgotten meaning is the sole object of folk- etymology.
Why Tuna more than Rangoa, or anyone else? 'We shall have to confess that the legend of Tuna throws but little light on the legend of Daphne, or on the etymology of her name. I never hinted that the legend of Tuna threw light on the etymology of the name of Daphne. Mangaian and Greek are not allied languages. Nor did I give the Tuna story as an explanation of the Daphne story.
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