Sources of Tahitian Legal Terms

From A Power in the World, by Lorenz Gonschor (Perspectives on the Global Past, U. Hawaii Press, 2019), Kindle Loc. 3001:

Unlike the Hawaiian constitutional model with its hybrid forms combining classical elements of statecraft with Western forms, the Tahitian legal code and its derivatives primarily used concepts from either biblical or English law, for example, the word ture for “law,” a Tahitian form of the Hebrew word ה רָוֹתּ (torah), basileia (pātīreia in contemporary Tahitian spelling), deriving from Greek βασιλεία (basileía) for kingdom, or tāvana, Tahitian rendering of governor (>*gāvana>tāvana) to designate the heads of the formerly independent clans or chiefdoms that were reorganized as districts within the new Christian kingdom (Académie Tahitienne 1999, 530; Montillier 1999, 270–271).

The marked contrast to the terminology for the equivalent political institutions in the Hawaiian kingdom—namely, kānāwai, aupuni, and kia‘āina, all of which derive from classical Hawaiian statecraft—is clear. It is also hardly surprising, given the nature or Pomare’s kingdom and the other Tahitian-language realms as secondary states modeled on outside examples, and not primary states that developed endogenously, such as the classical Hawaiian predecessor states of the Hawaiian Kingdom (Hommon 2013, 184–185).

For this book, the contrast becomes most relevant where influence of the Tahitian model intersected with that of Hawai‘i. For a short period, this also included the Hawaiian Islands themselves, where Tahitian converts played a significant role in converting the leading figures of the Hawaiian court to Christianity in the 1820s. However, this influence was short lived, and the Hawaiian political system developed along significantly different lines as we have seen earlier in this book.