Category Archives: language

by Joel | 12 November 2008 · 8:33 pm

Early Research on New Guinea-area Preposed Genitives

In my dissertation on word-order change in the Austronesian languages of New Guinea, I reviewed some of the earliest published typological research in the area. Here is a glimpse of what obsessed some of the earliest European researchers.

Over most of the territory occupied by Austronesian (AN) languages, genitive (or “possessor”) nominals (= GEN) follow head (or “possessed”) nominals (= N) in noun–noun genitive constructions. However, the reverse order (GEN + N) prevails in the neighborhood of New Guinea and nearby islands of Indonesia (from Sulawesi and Flores east). The distinctive “preposition of the genitive” in the AN languages of the latter area engendered much discussion by European scientists during the earliest era of their work in the area, when hardly any other syntactic information was available.

Various explanations were offered. Kanski and Kasprusch (1931) reviewed some of these explanations and concluded that the preposed genitive most likely resulted from the influence of Papuan languages, which also have preposed genitives and which share a very similar geographical range. This still seems the most likely explanation, although it remains a mystery why the preposed genitive has a wider distribution than any of the other grammatical features attributed to Papuan influence.

Even leaving Papuan influence aside, however, the narrower and contiguous geographical distribution of the preposed genitive, when compared with the unrestricted distribution of the postposed genitive, suggests that the former is innovative and originated somewhere in “extreme eastern Indonesia” (Blust 1974:12). (Genitives may have been optionally preposed in Proto-Austronesian, as they are in many Philippine languages. This would have made it easier for preposed genitives to become the dominant pattern in New Guinea-area Austronesian languages.)

The boundary between languages with preposed genitives and those with postposed genitives forms a wide arc running to the west, north, and east of the island of New Guinea. The southwest-to-northwest portion of this arc is frequently referred to as the “Brandes line” (after Brandes 1884), and the northwest-to-southeast portion has been called the “line of Friederici” (after Friederici 1913). (See, for example, Kanski and Kasprusch 1931, Cowan 1952).

The Brandes line was first assumed to be a genetic boundary (a linguistic analog of the Wallace Line perhaps). However, there was some disagreement about which genetic units it separated. Brandes (1884) himself thought it set off two groups of Indonesian languages. Jonker (1914) argued that two such Indonesian subgroups could not be distinguished. Schmidt (1926) thought the Brandes line marked the border between Indonesian and Melanesian languages.

(Brandes and Jonker were more familiar with the languages of Indonesia and were impressed with how similar in other respects the languages with preposed genitives were to Indonesian languages in general. Schmidt was more familiar with Melanesian languages and was impressed with how similar the genitive-preposing languages were to Melanesian languages in general. See Kanski and Kasprusch 1931:884.)

Kanski and Kasprusch (1931) offered a compromise. They identified four groups of languages:

Like Kanski and Kasprusch (and Jonker), most scholars today would not consider genitive word order to be a valid criterion for subgrouping. Another feature of genitive constructions was put forth as a better basis for distinguishing Indonesian from Melanesian languages. In western Austronesian (“Indonesian”) languages, genitive pronouns can be suffixed (or encliticized) to all nouns. In eastern Austronesian (“Melanesian”) languages, genitive pronouns can be suffixed directly to nouns only in case the possessed entity is an inalienable relationship to the possessor. In practice, this means that most body-part and kin terms are directly suffixed. Most other nouns are not. Instead, head nouns (denoting possessed entities) in constructions expressing an alienable relationship are preceded by genitive pronouns.

Schmidt (1926:424) and Kanski and Kasprusch (1931:889) regarded the influence of Papuan languages as responsible for the origin of the grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable possession in eastern Austronesian languages as a whole. Under Papuan influence, they argued, the AN languages in transition from Indonesia to Melanesia began to lose their original postposed genitives and to acquire preposed ones. Nouns denoting alienables formed the vanguard of this change. Nouns denoting inalienables, such as body parts and kin terms (which involve animate—usually human—possessors, one could add), were slower to lose the original genitive pronouns because reference to an inalienable almost always requires reference to a possessor as well. The inalienables retained their postposed pronouns long enough for the latter to become an integral part of the noun itself. The general change was thus arrested, with inalienables forming a relic category.

One major weakness of this hypothesis is that it ignores the distinction between pronominal and nominal genitives. In eastern AN languages generally, it may be more common for independent genitive pronouns to precede head nominals in cases of alienable possession. (There is considerable variation.) In all but the more narrowly defined “Papuan-influenced” languages, however, genitive nominals follow head nominals (N + GEN), whether or not alienable possession is involved. This hypothesis, then, leads one to the false expectation that genitive nominals precede head nominals in all languages in which the alienable–inalienable distinction exists.

The alienable–inalienable distinction is reconstructible for Proto-Oceanic (Pawley 1973:153–169), the ancestor of most of the languages of eastern Austronesia. However, it is not unique to that group. It also occurs in many languages of eastern Indonesia that are not daughters of Proto-Oceanic (Collins 1980:39 ff., Stresemann 1927:6). So even the presence or absence of the alienable–inalienable distinction does not adequately indicate genetic affiliation.

The traditional recognition of differences between “Indonesian” and “Melanesian” languages is now generally phrased in terms of “Oceanic” and “non-Oceanic” languages. The former term denotes what is generally recognized as a genetic unit (primarily on the basis of phonological criteria). The negative term “non-Oceanic” lumps together all other AN languages without implying that they form a single genetic unit. The boundary between the two groups of languages distinguished by the new phraseology has also shifted somewhat farther to the east since the time of Brandes, Schmidt, and Friederici. The new boundary, which in an earlier era would have been called “Grace’s line” (after Grace 1955:338, 1971:31), is assumed to have a firmer genetic basis than the two earlier boundaries. Grace’s line, separating Oceanic from non-Oceanic languages, runs north-northeast to south-southwest, intersecting 140° E longitude between New Guinea and Micronesia. The scope of this thesis is restricted to the AN languages west of Friederici’s line and east of Grace’s line. These languages can be characterized as “Papuan-influenced Oceanic.” However, before restricting discussion to these languages, it will be helpful to review the various boundaries and the nature of the groups of languages they set apart.

The Brandes line marks the western boundary of a group of languages with innovative genitive word order. This group of typologically similar, but genetically not so closely related, languages is bounded on the east by Friederici’s line. Somewhere east of the Brandes line is the western boundary of a group of languages showing an innovative grammatical distinction between alienable and inalienable genitives. Most of these languages are members of the Oceanic subgroup, a genetic unit, but the westernmost languages are not. East of this boundary lies Grace’s line, the western boundary of the Oceanic subgroup. The eastern boundary of the Oceanic subgroup, and of all AN languages showing the alienable–inalienable distinction, is the eastern border of Austronesian as a whole (east of Easter Island). (I am assuming that the distinction between a and o genitives in Polynesian can be considered somewhat akin, semantically but not structurally, to the alienable–inalienable distinction in the rest of Oceanic.)

References

Blust, Robert A. 1974. Proto-Austronesian syntax: The first step. Oceanic Linguistics 13:1–15.

Brandes, Jan Lourens Andries. 1884. Bijdrage tot de vergelijkende Klankleer der westersche Afdeeling van de Maleisch-Polynesische Taalfamilie. Utrecht, P.W. van der Weijer. 184 pp.

Collins, James. 1980. The historical relationships of the languages of Central Maluku, Indonesia. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago.

Cowan, H. K. J. 1951–1952. Genitief-constructie en Melanesische talen. Indonesië 5:307–313.

Friederici, Georg. 1912. Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einer amtlichen Forschungsreise nach dem Bismarck-Archipel im Jahre 1908, vol. 2, Beiträge zur Völker und Sprachenkunde von Deutsch-Neuguinea. Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten, Ergänzungsheft 5. Berlin, Mittler und Sohn.

Friederici, Georg. 1913. Wissenschaftliche Ergebnisse einer amtlichen Forschungsreise nach dem Bismarck-Archipel im Jahre 1908, vol. 3, Untersuchungen über eine melanesische Wanderstrasse. Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schutzgebieten, Ergänzungsheft 7. Berlin, Mittler und Sohn.

Grace, George W. 1955. Subgrouping Malayo-Polynesian: A report of tentative findings. American Anthropologist 57:337–339.

Grace, George W. 1971. Notes on the phonological history of the Austronesian languages of the Sarmi coast. Oceanic Linguistics 10:11–37.

Jonker, J. C. G. 1914. Kan men bij de talen van den Indischen Archipel eene westelijke en eene oostlijke afdeeling onderscheiden? Mededeelingen der Koninklijk Akademie van Wetenschappen, afdeeling Letterkunde, 4e Reeks, deel 12, pp. 314–417.

Kanski, P., and P. Kasprusch. 1931. Die indonesisch melanesischen Übergangssprachen auf den Kleinen Molukken. Anthropos 26:883–890.

Klaffl, Johanne, and Friederich Vormann. 1905. Die Sprachen des Berlinhafen-Bezirks in Deutsch-Neuguinea. Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen 8:1–138. (With additions by Wilhelm Schmidt.)

Pawley, Andrew K. 1973. Some problems in Proto-Oceanic grammar. Oceanic Linguistics 12:103–188.

Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1900, 1902. Die sprachlichen Verhältnisse von Deutsch Neuguinea. Zeitschrift für afrikanische und oceanische Sprachen 5(1900):354–384; 6(1902):1–99.

Schmidt, Wilhelm. 1926. Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde. Heidelberg, C. Winter. 595 pp.

Stresemann, Erwin. 1927. Die lauterscheinungen in den ambonischen Sprachen. Zeitschrift für Eingeborenensprachen, Beiheft 10. Berlin, Reimer. 224 pp.

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Filed under Germany, Indonesia, language, Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, scholarship

by Joel | 5 November 2008 · 9:10 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hodohodo, Czechia, Kanakysaurus

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal about a “shocking” new slacker attitude among Japanese workers referred to such workers as the hodohodo-zoku ‘so-so folks’. By itself, the word hodo (程) translates into ‘degree, limit, distance, status, amount’, and its reduplication, 程程, suggests ‘moderation’ or ‘judiciousness’. Grammatically, hodohodo behaves like an ideophone, but then ideophones in Japanese generally behave like nouns. To make it into a verb, you have to add -suru ‘do, be’, to make it into an adverbial you add the postposition ni, and so on. But I suspect hodohodo fails one test for onomatopoeic ideophones in Japanese: the ability to occur before -to ‘with’, in the equivalent of English ‘with a [plop-plop, fizz-fizz, etc.]’. I await correction from Matt of No-sword.

Last weekend, I also had the opportunity to meet a scholar visiting from the Czech Republic, who repeatedly referred to her nation as Czechia—a most sensible formulation which I subsequently found to have had official sanction since 1993 (along with Česko, the Czech equivalent), but which seems to be very slow to spread among English speakers, who perhaps still feel guilty about agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia in 1938 and want to compensate by resisting any attempt to shorten the fuller form of its current name. However, feeling no guilt on that score despite my English heritage, I henceforth resolve to refer to that glorious center of historic dissidence as Czechia, plain and simple. In fact, I’ve just added Czechia to my list of country categories for this blog. I had already added Bohemia before, but that does no justice to Moravia, which has, if anything, an even greater tradition of religious dissidence.

Finally, I see that the latest issue of Pacific Science (vol. 63, no. 1, 2009, but already online at BioOne) reports the discovery of a new species of a lizard genus indigenous to New Caledonia, a viviparous skink genus with the wonderfully appropriate name, Kanakysaurus.

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Filed under Czechia, Japan, language, nationalism, Pacific, scholarship, science

by Joel | 1 November 2008 · 8:22 am

Hindustani for British Royalty, 1921

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 58-59:

On 26 October 1921, Dickie [Mountbatten] and David [Windsor] left Portsmouth on the battle cruiser HMS Renown. On 12 November, they came ashore at Aden on the south coast of Arabia, the westernmost British colony ruled from Delhi. The pair of them drove past large gatherings of black spectators hemmed in by the occasional white man in a pith helmet. Union Jacks fluttered in the sky, and a huge banner was unfurled. It addressed the Prince of Wales with a loyal exhortation: “Tell Daddy we are all happy under British rule.” And it was from this acceptably loyal outpost of his future empire that David embarked finally for the Jewel itself….

The prince’s itinerary had been planned according to long-established royal tradition. He was to progress around India attending interminable parties, opening buildings, killing as much wildlife as possible and only interacting with the common people by waving at them from a parade. The sentiments of the royal party were made plain in the booklet of Hindustani phrases produced by Dickie and Sir Geoffrey de Montmorency and circulated on board HMS Renown. It comprised a list of basic numbers and verbs, plus a few everyday expressions. These included:

Ghoosul teeyar kurro—Make ready the bath
Yeh boot sarf kurro—Make clean these boots
Peg do—Give me a whisky and soda
Ghora lao—Bring round the horse
Yeh miler hai; leyjao—This is dirty; take it away
Tum Kootch Angrezi bolte hai?—Do you speak any English?
Mai neigh sumujhta—I don’t understand

The words for please and thank you are nowhere to be found.

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by Joel | 1 November 2008 · 7:26 am

Rebranding British Royalty, 1914-1917

From Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Emperor, by Alex von Tunzelmann (Picador, 2008), pp. 43-45:

ON 28 JUNE 1914, AN AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKE AND HIS WIFE were shot in Sarajevo by a nineteen-year-old terrorist. Assassinations were not unusual at the time. Victims in recent years had included the presidents of Mexico, France and the United States, the empresses of Korea and Austria, a Persian shah and the kings of Italy, Greece and Serbia. Portugal had two kings assassinated on the same day in 1908. But the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would swiftly assume its legendary status as the trigger for the Great War. Swift to feel its tremors was the fourteen-year-old great-grandson of Queen Victoria, His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg….

Four months to the day after Franz Ferdinand’s death, the elder Prince Louis of Battenberg was removed from his position as First Sea Lord. Prince Louis had been British since 1868 and had served in the Royal Navy since he was fourteen years old. But by October 1914 Britain was at war with Germany, and there were far too many Germans visible in high places. For King George V, of the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the public tide of anti-German feeling was alarming. He was largely German; his wife, the former Princess May of Teck, was wholly German; his recently deceased father, King Edward VII, had even spoken English with a strong German accent. It was uncomfortably obvious where all this might lead, and a high-profile sacrifice was required to satisfy the public. Prince Louis was at the top of the list.

And so the king and his First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, agreed to throw one of their most senior military experts onto the pyre at the beginning of the war, because his name was foreign….

But the humiliation of the Battenbergs was not complete. On 17 July 1917, a mass rebranding of royalty was ordered by George V. The king led by example this time, dropping Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (which was, in any case, a title — nobody knew what his surname was, though they suspected without enthusiasm that it might be Wettin or Wipper), and adopting the British-sounding Windsor. Much against their will, the rest of the in-laws were de-Germanized. Prince Alexander of Battenberg became the Marquess of Carisbrooke; Prince Alexander of Teck became the Earl of Athlone; Adolphus, Duke of Teck, became the Marquess of Cambridge. The unfortunate princesses of Schleswig-Holstein were demoted, in the king’s words, to “Helena Victoria and Marie Louise of Nothing.” And the unemployed Prince Louis of Battenberg would be Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven…. Henceforth, Prince Louis would be a marquess, and Battenberg a cake.

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Filed under Britain, Europe, Germany, language, nationalism, war

by Joel | 26 October 2008 · 8:09 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Hokahoka, Hougan, Hiiki

A seasonal Japanese matsutake (松茸 ‘pine ear’ mushroom) tasting menu at a restaurant named Yoshitsune (義経) turned up a couple of new vocabulary items that caught my fancy.

ほかほか hokahoka ‘warmth, heat’ – The menu for the fall seasonal special announced 目の前で松茸釜飯がほかほかで炊き上がります me no mae de matsutake kamameshi ga hokahoka de takiagarimasu ‘the matsutake (flavored) rice-pot cooks up warmly before your eyes’. And indeed it did. The fragrantly flavored rice finished cooking in each individual-sized cauldron perched above a can of sterno as we oohed and aahed our way through the courses leading up to the pièce de résistance.

The ideophone hokahoka does not behave grammatically like an adjective, despite its normal English translation into an adjective. It seems better to think of it as a noun, as in the postpositional phrase hokahoka de ‘from the heat’. As a noun modifier, hokahoka needs a genitive (or nominalizing) no after it—not the na that follows “adjectival nominals” like the hen of hen na gaijin ‘strange foreigner’. So a piping-hot sweet potato can be described as hokahoka no satsuma imo. And you can convey that you feel a hokahoka sense of warmth by adding the “light verb” to the ‘heat’: hokahoka suru ‘do/be hokahoka’. Let the mnemonic be ‘do the hokahoka’!

Another ideophone with a very similar form and a very similar meaning is pokapoka ‘pleasant warmth, toasty warmth, warming (weather)’.

判官贔屓 hougan/hangan biiki ‘favoring the underdog’ – Our restaurant was named after Minamoto no Yoshitsune, a famous warrior of the Minamoto (= Genji) clan whose martial feats played a key role in defeating the Taira (= Heike) clan in the Genpei War. The Genpei War (1180–85) has often been compared to the equally treachery-ridden English War of the Roses (1455–85) between the noble houses of Lancaster and York, but the latter led to a gradual centralization of authority in England, while the former led to a dispersal of power in Japan that eventually culminated in a long period of civil war before Oda Nobunaga unified the country and paved the way for the centralizing Tokugawa Shogunate (1603–1868).

Despite his many heroic feats, Yoshitsune eventually sided with the Emperor Go-Shirakawa (After-Shirakawa, i.e., Shirakawa II) against his own elder brother Yoritomo, who went on to found the Kamakura Shogunate. When Yoshitsune’s forces lost, he was forced to commit suicide—a pattern that went on to become all too familiar in Japanese history. But his fame lives on, as does his Imperial Court name 判官 hougan/hangan in the expression 判官贔屓 hougan/hangan biiki ‘favoring Hougan (= Yoshitsune)’, a phrase Hatena Keyword defines as 弱いものに、弱いからと言う理由で、えこひいきしてしまうこと yowai mono ni, yowai kara to yuu riyuu de, ekohiiki shiteshimau koto ‘the act of favoring the weaker party just because it is weaker’.

The kanji for the compound ekohiiki, written in hiragana above, are 依怙贔屓, etymologically ‘relying-strength’. An impartial or fair person is an ekohiiki no nai hito ‘favoritism-lacking person’. The tendency to favor one who loses, like Yoshitsune/Hougan, with dignity and honor intact has long been deeply embedded in Japanese culture. Witness the undying popularity of stories about the 47 ronin and Saigo Takamori.

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by Joel | 23 October 2008 · 8:56 pm

Lamarckian Identities in PNG

From James B. Watson’s chapter “Other people do other things: Lamarckian identities in Kainantu Subdistrict, Papua New Guinea” in Cultural Identity and Ethnicity in the Pacific, edited by Jocelyn Linnekin and Lin Poyer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1990), pp. 17, 26:

The aboriginal peoples of Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands are organized in autonomous polities, some with as few as one or two hundred members. Many if not most of these local peoples experience episodes of radical revision in their membership. Most groups are formed in a highly fluid sociopolitical field, intermittently marked by relocations, realignments, and the patriation of alien immigrants who have been expelled by hostile neighbors from their own lands elsewhere. Restless or disgruntled insiders split off to form new groups; refugee outsiders are recruited from time to time to reinforce the ranks of those remaining. To the literal-minded genealogist, the long-term kinship and continuity of each such group seem confused, even compromised.

A truncated local sense of history nevertheless contains the frequent events of fission and fusion. In spite of ongoing exchanges of personnel, a common and ostensibly continuous local identity immerses not only long-established elements of the community but, in time, the descendants of recent immigrants….

Over half a dozen languages are spoken in the immediate vicinity of Kainantu, and all the communities I resided in have close social ties to at least one community of alien speech. Often two or three other languages are represented in these linkages. Many communities of the vicinity have incorporated refugees who arrived speaking a language other than that of their hosts. With time, if the refugees remain, their original language may be lost, but probably not without a distinct residue of the sounds, words, attitudes, and cultural practices they brought with them. In some communities in the 1960s there were refugees or their descendants still speaking their original language, … resulting in their designation by the community (from Pidgin) as “hapkas” [half-caste].

What does this mean for language documentation and conservation efforts in the area? To whom does any particular language belong, and for how long?

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by Joel | 21 October 2008 · 6:25 am

India’s Vibrant Vernacular Press

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 223-224:

The rise of the vernacular press would have pleased Mahatma Gandhi. He disapproved of advertising and printed no ads in his papers. But perhaps he would have relented if he had realized that advertising revenue is the lifeblood of the vernacular press. When Gandhi reorganized the Provincial Congress Committees along linguistic lines in 1920, he did so because he was convinced that people must conduct their political debates in their mother tongue. The thriving vernacular press proves this point. Gandhi would also have been pleased by the national orientation of the vernacular press: none of the papers mentioned back any kind of secessionism. This is also due to the fact that the ‘print capitalists’ who control the papers are very much aware of the benefits of an integrated national market. Another encouraging feature is that none of these papers are ‘party papers’ to the extent of being owned and operated by a political party. The private owners of the papers may sometimes back a particular party, as Ramoji Rao backed the TDP, but such alliances are temporary with the party depending on the ‘print capitalist’, not the other way round. In earlier times parties controlling the government could exercise considerable influence on newspapers by placing advertisements or withholding them. Nowadays revenue from commercial ads is far more important than that derived from government advertising and this has greatly enhanced the freedom of the press.

India’s lively and free press is of great importance to the country’s democracy. It is significant that the first big spurt in growth of the vernacular press was witnessed after Indira Gandhi’s ‘Emergency’ had been terminated in 1977; her attempt at gagging the press by means of her emergency powers led to a pent-up demand for information. Many people became avid readers when they had access to a free press once more. There is, of course, the more subtle method of influencing the press by co-opting journalists: giving them official importance or letting them know that their careers may depend on adopting certain political views fits in with this method. By now journalists earn good salaries and enjoy many perks, so the threat of forfeiting them might influence their views. But the large number of journalists would make it difficult to co-opt all of them: in 1950 there were only about 2,000 in India but by 1993 there were 13,000 officially registered journalists and there may have been many unregistered ones. At present there are probably more than 26,000. As there are no powerful unions for journalists in India Indian journalism has no collective voice; but the large number and the great variety of journalists are in themselves guarantees of the freedom of the press.

Most Indian journalists are urban people who only occasionally show up in the countryside. But they have rural counterparts who are really behind the newspaper revolution which has swept India in recent years. These rural stringers are often graduates engaged in various activities in their locality. They may own some land or a repair shop and also serve as distributors of newspapers, as advertising agents and as part-time correspondents. They usually are not paid by the editors but send in their news items free of charge. If their contributions are printed, this enhances their reputation in the village and helps to increase the circulation of the paper which they distribute. In their own way, these people support the freedom of the press and it is mainly down to them that huge numbers of newspapers are sold in India every day.

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Filed under democracy, India, language, publishing

by Joel | 15 October 2008 · 10:18 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: -右衛門

Wally Yonamine, whose interesting biography I’ve been reading, has an Okinawan surname that is neither in P. G. O’Neill’s book Japanese Names nor in my Canon Wordtank electronic dictionary. But, of course, both the English and the Japanese Wikipedia entries about him give the kanji used to write Yonamine: 与那嶺.

While consulting O’Neill’s Japanese Names, however, I came across a wonderfully archaic-sounding given name for men, 四万四五右衛門, which is pronounced Yomoshigo_emon, a name that has fewer syllables (or moras) than kanji. The kanji mean ‘4-10000-4-5-right-guard-gate’, and 右 ‘right’ is the one that doesn’t rate its own syllable. The Sino-Japanese reading for 右 is U, so it’s easy to see how the high rounded vowel -u- could get lost in the transitional glide (-w-) from a preceding round vowel (o-) to a following unrounded vowel (-e). The U does get pronounced when it starts the name, as in 右衛門 Uemon ‘right-ward-gate’.

There are many such given names ending in 右衛門 -_emon ‘right-ward-gate’ and one imagines that being a gatekeeper was a rather important function in many a feudal household: 五郎右衛門 Goro_emon ‘5-son-right-ward-gate’, 八郎右衛門 Hachiro_emon ‘8-son-right-ward-gate’, 孫右衛門 Mago_emon ‘grandchild-right-ward-gate’, 万右衛門 Man_emon ‘10000-right-ward-gate’. Only the last of these fails to provide the environment expected to encourage the -U- to glide away.

Not all ward-gates (garde-portes?) guarded the right gate, or guarded the right side of the gate. Some guarded the left as well: 文左衛門 Bun-za-emon ‘culture-left-ward-gate’ (or ‘literate’?), 権左衛門 Gon-za-emon ‘assistant-left-ward-gate’ (same gon- as in the old words gonsuke ‘manservant’, gonsai ‘concubine’), 茂左衛門 Mon-za-emon ‘lush-left-ward-gate’ (or ‘thick, luxuriant’).

These Japanese names ending in -(za)emon ‘wardgate’ sound to me even more archaic than those ending in -suke ‘servant’, though perhaps not as archaic as Aethelbert or Ealdwulf sound in English. However, they are more equivalent etymologically to English names like Stewart (< steward < ‘sty-warden’) or Lord (< ‘loaf-warden’).

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by Joel | 12 October 2008 · 9:33 am

Numbami Kin Terminology, PNG

Speakers of the Numbami language in Papua New Guinea employ bifurcate merging, Iroquois-type kinship terminology. One of the major classificatory criteria of such a system is whether a chain of relationships crosses sex lines or stays within the same sex. For instance, siblings of the same sex (parallel siblings) are distinguished according to whether they are elder or younger than oneself (ego). Siblings of the opposite sex (cross-siblings) are not. Similarly, one’s father’s brothers and mother’s sisters are distinguished according to whether they are elder or younger than the respective parent, and their children (parallel cousins) are classified as either elder or younger parallel siblings in accordance with the relative age of their parents.

In contrast, relative age is not regularly distinguished for relatives linked across sex lines, such as one’s father’s sister’s children or mother’s brother’s children (cross-cousins). This lack of age-ranking among cross-cousins (and perhaps marriageability) may suggest why the gode-lu-gode (‘cousin-to-cousin’) relationship is considered the most open and easygoing kin relationship among the Numbami.

Nearly every major kin category is indicated by a pair of forms that distinguish female from male members of the same category. The term for females is usually derived from the base form by means of a suffix, usually -ewe, that is transparently related to ewa ‘woman, female’. (The nasal that often intervenes is discussed below.) Whenever there is a derived female-specific counterpart, the base form usually refers only to males, but it can also be used to refer to all members of the particular kinship status, whether male or female.

amba ‘great-grandfather’
ambanewe ‘great-grandmother’

tumbuna ‘grandson, grandfather’
tumbunewe ‘granddaughter, grandmother’

tama ‘father’ (somewhat archaic or technical in usage)
tina ‘mother’ (somewhat archaic or metaphorical in usage)

mama ‘father’ (both referential and vocative)
awa ‘mother’ (both referential and vocative)

mama bamo‘father’s elder brother, mother’s elder sister’s spouse’
awa bamo ‘mother’s elder sister, father’s elder brother’s spouse’

mama kae ‘father’s younger brother, mother’s younger sister’s spouse’
awa kae ‘mother’s younger sister, father’s younger brother’s spouse’

sika ‘elder (usually male) parallel sibling (father’s elder brother’s son or mother’s elder sister’s son)’
sikanewe ‘elder female parallel sibling (father’s elder brother’s daughter or mother’s younger sister’s daughter)’

kapa ‘younger (usu. male) parallel sibling (father’s younger brother’s son or mother’s younger sister’s son)’
kapowe ‘younger female parallel sibling (father’s younger brother’s daughter or mother’s younger sister’s daughter)’

lu ‘cross-sibling (woman’s brother or male parallel cousin)’
lunewe ‘female cross-sibling (man’s sister or female parallel cousin)’

gode ‘cross-cousin (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s child, usu. male)’
godenewe ‘female cross-cousin (mother’s brother’s or father’s sister’s daughter)’

asowa ‘spouse (husband or wife)’
asosika ‘spouse of one’s elder parallel sibling’

asokapa ‘spouse of one’s younger parallel sibling’
iwa ‘spouse’s (usu. wife’s) cross-sibling’ (Tok Pisin tambu)

iwanewe ‘husband’s cross-sibling’
kolamundu ‘cross-sibling’s spouse’ (Tok Pisin tambu)

wowa ‘uncle (mother’s brother or father’s sister’s husband)’
wawe ‘aunt (father’s sister or mother’s brother’s wife)’

natu ‘offspring, son (of self or parallel sibling)’
natunewe ‘daughter (of self or parallel sibling)’

tamota ‘nephew (son of cross-sibling or cross-cousin)’
tamotewe ‘niece (daughter of cross-sibling or cross-cousin)’

The female suffix is most likely responsible for preserving the last vestiges of an intervening set of possessive suffixes that have been lost everywhere except on a handful of these kin terms. Even where the suffixes survive, however, they do not constitute a full paradigm (only singulars) and are highly variable in usage. Moreover, they are always redundant. Except when they appear on vocatives, they are always accompanied by the preposed possessive pronouns. Whenever there is doubt about which form to use, the ending -n-ewe, which used to signal a 3rd person singular possessor, appears to be the safest choice.

naŋgi lu ‘my (usu. male) cross-sibling’
anami lu ‘thy (usu. male) cross-sibling’
ena lu ‘his/her (usu. male) cross-sibling’

naŋgi luŋgewe/lunewe ‘my female cross-sibling’
anami lumewe/lunewe ‘thy female cross-sibling’
ena lunewe ‘his/her female cross-sibling’

naŋgi gode ‘my (usu. male) cross-cousin’
anami gode ‘thy (usu. male) cross-cousin’
ena gode ‘his/her (usu. male) cross-cousin’

naŋgi godenewe/godeŋgewe ‘my female cross-cousin’
anami godenewe/godemewe ‘thy female cross-cousin’
ena godenewe ‘his/her female cross-cousin’

It may not be coincidental that the word bumewe ‘European[s], white[s]’ looks like a term for females. Compare Iwal pupkawe ‘European’, avie ‘woman’, but Jabêm bômbôm ‘European’, bômbômò ‘European female’.

Bifurcate-merging terminology also shows up in older varieties of Tok Pisin (and other Pacific pidgins/creoles/Englishes), where for some speakers brata (< ‘brother’) can mean ‘parallel sibling’, while susa (< Eng. ‘European’) can mean ‘cross-sibling’ (as defined above). So a female might be referring to her brother when she says susa bilong mi and might be referring to her sister when she says brata bilong mi.

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by Joel | 11 October 2008 · 10:18 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Susokman

From Village on the Edge: Changing Times in Papua New Guinea, by Michael French Smith (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2002), pp. 164-165:

In the mid-1990s, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington interviewed dozens of Wewak’s more affluent Papua New Guinean residents, including “lawyers, doctors, nurses, bankers, clergy, teachers, managers, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, army personnel [and] civil servants,” both male and female. They also mingled with them at Rotary Club events, the Yacht Club, and the Wewak Resort and Country Club where these business and professional people went to socialize and network….

[I]n order to take part in the life of the urban elite, Papua New Guineans generally have to weaken their ties to their village kin. In villagers’ eyes, attending the university, working for the government, or habitually wearing shoes and socks should not dissolve the bonds of kinship. But the wearers of shoes and socks (the susokman, as they are called in Tok Pisin) find that it is difficult to live up to village definitions of their kinship obligations and simultaneously provide for the basics of urban life—housing, food, business clothing—and take part in urban elite social life, including the professional networking that goes on in restaurants, in clubs, and on the golf course. Gewertz and Errington argue that villagers tend to define success as meeting a wide variety of kinship obligations; but for the urban elite, success means providing an affluent life for one’s immediate family, and that usually means putting strict limits on generosity to more distant kin.

Village kin may see this as lack of generosity, but they are judging by the moral ideals of village society. In terms of those ideals, material wealth is for creating and maintaining social bonds, and wealth gained at the expense of social ties is tainted. But what looks like antisocial greed to the village is necessity and prudence to the urban elite. If they fall on hard times because they have given unstintingly to their village kin, their urban peers will not praise their generosity; they will criticize their moral weakness. To join the elite, then, Papua New Guineans have had to work hard; but they have also needed good luck, and they have had to enter a different world of morality.

When I arrived in Papua New Guinea in 1976 to start linguistic fieldwork, the first thing I did was to throw away the worn-out tennis shoes I had traveled in. All during my student years in Hawai‘i during the 1970s, I rarely wore any footwear but Japanese zori (rubber slippers). When Hawai‘i Loa College required caps and gowns when I graduated in 1973, I went barefoot beneath my gown.

The second whimsical thing I did in PNG, on the taxi ride in from the airport to Port Moresby, was to stop by Koki Market to buy betel nut. (I got some for the taxi driver, too.) It was my first chance to use the Tok Pisin I had studied in grad school to prepare for fieldwork.

I arrived from Australia during Easter holidays and had trouble reaching my contact at UPNG, so I spent the first night at a downtown hotel, where I discovered that the dining room required shoes and socks. That was a new way to distinguish the elites from the hoi polloi in the newly independent nation, since discrimination on the basis of race was now prohibited. That evening I decided to order supper to my room.

Betel chewing was also prohibited inside the hotel, so before dinner I took the makings of several betel quids—areca nuts, betel pepper catkins, and slake-lime powder—outside onto the near-empty holiday streets. A young Papua New Guinea man soon came up to chat and I offered him a chew. It was my second chance to practice Tok Pisin in country, but it ended soon after I figured out what my new acquaintance meant when he asked me, “Masta, yu laik takim kok o nogat?” His native language must have been one in which [t] and [s] are allophones of a single phoneme, which sounds like [s] in front of /i/ (as in Kiribati) but sounds like [t] elsewhere. When I belatedly deciphered his accent and understood his intent, I laughed it off with “Ah, nogat ya!” and turned my unshod feet back toward the haven of the shod and socked.

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