My Tahiti by Robert Dean Frisbie — Read

Wherever the Chinaman has established himself he has introduced his own culture. From his religion to his culinary arts, his agriculture to his opium pipe, he has remained Chinese in spite of an incongruous environment. In his language, though, he has been forced to capitulate; but rather than learn the language of the country of his adoption, always he has invented one of his own: a compromise between Chinese and the new tongue, which will be understood but will be distinctly Chinese in its genius.

This the Chinamen did in Tahiti, and their compromise proved to be a masterpiece of condensation, adequate for expounding any subject to a listener of imagination, and so simple in grammar that it was soon adopted by the Europeans in their intercourse with the natives, and later, to a lesser degree, by the Tahitians themselves.