Maná

Mana is a word found in Austronesian languages meaning "power, effectiveness, prestige", where in most cases the power is understood to be supernatural. The exact semantics depends on the language. The concept is a major one in Polynesian cultures. It is part of contemporary Pacific Islander culture. The term came to the attention of western anthropologists through the reports of missionaries in the islands. Its study was included in the topic of cultural anthropology, specifically in the anthropology of religion. Links were seen between it and an earlier phase of western religion, animism at first, then pre-animism.

In recent decades, the comparative method (the staple method of reconstructing a proto-language, or ancestor of a group of languages that seem related because of their similarities, in the tree model of historical linguistics), has been enhanced by the application of phylogenetic method. In it, as applied to linguistics, linguistic features take the place of molecular sequences. In biology, the goal of comparing genetic sequences is to determine a percentage of similarity between the chromosomes of two species, which may then be hypothesized to have branched from each other in the tree at a time that is consistent with the rate of change of each. In linguistic "phylogenetic" comparisons (which have nothing to do with genes), the desired result is percentages of similarity between languages, from which a tree structure may be reconstructed. Each branch may be termed a "level" and represents a proto-language.

The method begins with a database of features to be compared. Software exists to make various types of comparisons. The results depend to a large degree of the type of data selected and the method of comparison. The Polynesian Lexicon (POLLEX) Project, "initiated in 1965 by Bruce Biggs", uses mainly lexical data. By comparison of words from the oceanic languages collected in the lexicon, it assesses levels of proto-language in the phylogenetic tree.

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