Category Archives: Micronesia

by | 16 March 2007 · 5:43 pm

Peleliu D-Day + 1, 16 September 1944

Bloody Nose Ridge dominated the entire airfield. The Japanese had concentrated their heavy weapons on high ground; these were directed from observation posts at elevations as high as three hundred feet from which they could look down on us as we advanced. I could see men moving ahead of my squad, but I didn’t know whether our battalion, 3/5 [3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment], was moving across behind 2/5 and then wheeling to the right. There were also men about twenty yards to our rear.

We moved rapidly in the open, amid craters and coral rubble, through ever increasing enemy fire. I saw men to my right and left running bent as low as possible. The shells screeched and whistled, exploding all around us. In many respects it was more terrifying than the landing, because there were no vehicles to carry us along, not even the thin steel sides of an amtrac for protection. We were exposed, running on our own power through a veritable shower of deadly metal and the constant crash of explosions.

For me the attack resembled World War I movies I had seen of suicidal Allied infantry attacks through shell fire on the Western Front. I clenched my teeth, squeezed my carbine stock, and recited over and over to myself, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me….”

The sun bore down unmercifully, and the heat was exhausting. Smoke and dust from the barrage limited my vision. The ground seemed to sway back and forth under the concussions. I felt as though I were floating along in the vortex of some unreal thunderstorm. Japanese bullets snapped and cracked, and tracers went by me on both sides at waist height. This deadly small-arms fire seemed almost insignificant amid the erupting shells. Explosions and the hum and the growl of shell fragments shredded the air. Chunks of blasted coral stung my face and hands while steel fragments spattered down on the hard rock like hail on a city street. Everywhere shells flashed like giant firecrackers.

Through the haze I saw Marines stumble and pitch forward as they got hit. I then looked neither right nor left but just straight to my front. The farther we went, the worse it got. The noise and concussion pressed in on my ears like a vise. I gritted my teeth and braced myself in anticipation of the shock of being struck down at any moment. It seemed impossible that any of us could make it across. We passed several craters that offered shelter, but I remembered the order to keep moving. Because of the superb discipline and excellent esprit of the Marines, it had never occurred to us that the attack might fail.

About halfway across, I stumbled and fell forward. At that instant a large shell exploded to my left with a flash and a roar. A fragment ricocheted off the deck and growled over my head as I went down. On my right, Snafu let out a grunt and fell as the fragment struck him. As he went down, he grabbed his left side. I crawled quickly to him. Fortunately the fragment had spent much of its force, and luckily hit against Snafu’s heavy web pistol belt. The threads on the broad belt were frayed in about an inch-square area.

I knelt beside him, and we checked his side. He had only a bruise to show for his incredible luck. On the deck I saw the chunk of steel that had hit him. It was about an inch square and a half inch thick. I picked up the fragment and showed it to him. Snafu motioned toward his pack. Terrified though I was amid the hellish chaos, I calmly juggled the fragment around in my hands—it was still hot—and dropped it into his pack. He yelled something that sounded dimly like, “Let’s go.” I reached for the carrying strap of the mortar, but he pushed my hand away and lifted the gun to his shoulder. We got up and moved on as fast as we could. Finally we got across and caught up with other members of our company who lay panting and sweating amid low bushes on the northeastern side of the airfield.

How far we had come in the open I never knew, but it must have been several hundred yards. Everyone was visibly shaken by the thunderous barrage we had just come through. When I looked into the eyes of those fine Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester veterans, some of America’s best, I no longer felt ashamed of my trembling hands and almost laughed at myself with relief.

To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying, but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of anyone who hasn’t experienced it. The attack across Peleliu’s airfield was the worst combat experience I had during the entire war. It surpassed, by the intensity of the blast and shock of the bursting shells, all the subsequent horrifying ordeals on Peleliu and Okinawa.

SOURCE: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E. B. Sledge (Oxford U. Press, 1990), pp. 79-80 (reviewed here: “A biology professor after the war at the University of Montevallo in Alabama, Sledge brings an academic style to the text that flows easily from chapter to chapter.”)

Leave a comment

Filed under Japan, Micronesia, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 16 March 2007 · 5:18 pm

Souvenir Hunting on Peleliu, September 1944

During this lull the men stripped the packs and pockets of the enemy dead for souvenirs. This was a gruesome business, but Marines executed it in a most methodical manner. Helmet headbands were checked for flags, packs and pockets were emptied, and gold teeth were extracted. Sabers, pistols, and hari-kari knives were highly prized and carefully care for until they could be sent to the folks back home or sold to some pilot or sailor for a fat price. Rifles and other larger weapons usually were rendered useless and thrown aside. They were too heavy to carry in addition to our own equipment. They would be picked up later as fine souvenirs by the rear-echelon troops. The men in the rifle companies had a lot of fun joking about the hair-raising stories these people, who had never seen a live Japanese or been shot at, would probably tell after the war.

The men gloated over, compared, and often swapped their prizes. It was a brutal, ghastly ritual the likes of which have occurred since ancient times on battlefields where the antagonists have possessed a profound mutual hatred. It was uncivilized, as is all war, and was carried out with that particular savagery that characterized the struggle between the Marines and the Japanese. It wasn’t simply souvenir hunting or looting the enemy dead; it was more like Indian warriors taking scalps.

While I was removing a bayonet and scabbard from a dead Japanese, I noticed a Marine near me. He wasn’t in our mortar section but had happened by and wanted to get in on the spoils. He came up to me dragging what I assumed to be a corpse. But the Japanese wasn’t dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn’t move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath.

The Japanese’s mouth glowed with huge gold-crowned teeth, and his captor wanted them. He put the point of his kabar [knife] on the base of a tooth and hit the handle with the palm of his hand. Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knife point glanced off the tooth and sank deeply into the victim’s mouth. The Marine cursed him and with a slash cut his cheeks open to each ear. He put his foot on the sufferer’s lower jaw and tried again. Blood poured out of the soldier’s mouth. He made a gurgling noise and thrashed wildly. I shouted, “Put the man out of his misery.” All I got for an answer was a cussing out. Another Marine ran up, put a bullet in the enemy soldier’s brain, and ended his agony. The scavenger grumbled and continued extracting his prizes undisturbed.

Such was the incredible cruelty that decent men could commit when reduced to a brutish existence in their fight for survival amid the violent death, terror, tension, fatigue, and filth that was the infantryman’s war. Our code of conduct toward the enemy differed drastically from that prevailing back at the division CP.

SOURCE: With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E. B. Sledge (Oxford U. Press, 1990), pp. 118, 120

1 Comment

Filed under Japan, Micronesia, Pacific, U.S., war

by | 20 February 2007 · 6:20 pm

Two Hawaiian Canoes Reach Micronesia

Today’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports that two Polynesian voyaging canoes have made landfall in Micronesia.

MAJURO, Marshall Islands » To the sounds of ukuleles and a conch shell, the Hawaiian double-hulled canoes Hokule’a and Alingano Maisu arrived at a dock here today, completing their 2,200-mile journey from Hawaii to Micronesia.

The vessels are on a pilgrimage to Satawal atoll to deliver the Alingano Maisu to renowned navigator Mau Piailug, who taught Pacific way-finding to native Hawaiians and sparked a renaissance in the building of voyaging canoes in the Pacific….

The welcome in Majuro was a celebration of two Pacific cultures that have kept sailing traditions alive, and of their ancient mariners who developed ocean-voyaging methods centuries before Westerners had nautical navigation equipment to cross vast oceans.

Majuro islander Alson Kelon, who escorted the vessels into port, said he felt proud to be a Micronesian and honored to support the voyaging tradition of his ancestors.

Kelon said he helped to found a canoe sailing group in Majuro after witnessing the Hokule’a make its first voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976.

He said the teaching traditional voyaging integrates all kinds of learning, including mathematics, science, oceanography, astronomy, English and leadership….

The late Big Island canoe builder Clay Bertelmann promised to deliver a double-hulled canoe to Mau about five years ago, and his family has continued to fulfill the promise….

Mau’s son Sesario said his father’s health is waning.

“The main thing is to get it there while he’s still around,” he said.

Sesario said his family has to discuss what to do with the Alingano Maisu, but he hopes that it will be used to carry on his father’s work teaching way-finding navigation.

Sesario, a police officer in Yap, said he would like to use the canoe as a way to reach youths at risk of becoming criminals.

Leave a comment

Filed under Micronesia, Polynesia

by | 30 May 2006 · 8:29 pm

Saipan Impressions: Chamorro and Carolinian

Carolinian village marker, GarapanWhen I went to Saipan I didn’t expect to encounter either of its two indigenous languages: Chamorro and Saipanese Carolinian. And indeed I saw next to nothing written in either language. Nothing in Chamorro but the greeting “Hafa Adai” (on every license plate), and nothing in Carolinian except a plaque (pictured here) in the American Memorial Park that marked the site of the old Carolinian village at Garapan.

But then I found KCNM-FM 101.1 on my rent-a-car radio and stayed tuned to it whenever I was driving. It played a wonderful assortment of contemporary Micronesian music, from Palauan enka to Chuukese country to Gilbertese gospel, which can all be sampled on Jane Resture‘s Micronesian Music Radio on Live365.com.

The music was interrupted periodically by NPR news in English and occasional announcements or classified ads in Chamorro, with prices quoted in English and telephone numbers in Chamorro. The Chamorro number system is now based on Spanish: unu, dos, tres, kuatro, sinko, sais, siette, ocho, nuebi, dies. (According to Wikipedia, the basic set of old Chamorro numbers was hacha, hugua, tulu, fatfat, lima, gunum, fiti, gualu, sigua, manot/fulu—far more Philippine-looking.)

Chamorros and Carolinians on Saipan are fighting an uphill battle to preserve their ancestral languages (and many have already surrendered). The resident population of the Northern Marianas is about 35% Filipino, 20% Chamorro, 10% Chinese, 10% Korean, 5% “Anglo”, with smaller numbers of Japanese, Palauans, and other Micronesians. Most of the retail clerks and wait help I encountered spoke Filipino and Filipino-accented English to each other. Most of the tourists I encountered spoke Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. The signage around Chalan Kanoa, which used to be the main Micronesian barrio when the U.S. Navy controlled most of the island, is now overwhelmingly Chinese and Korean, with some Japanese—and English, of course, one of the official languages of the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas.

The most ubiquitous signs in Saipan say Poker. Many such signs are lit up round the clock. Almost every little country store has a Poker sign over one door, often next to one above the store entrance that says Food Stamps Accepted.

On 18 March 2005, the Saipan Tribune published three essays from a “contest held by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs’ Chamorro/Carolinian Policy Commission to promote indigenous languages in the Commonwealth.” Let’s examine a few sentences of each.

Carolinian

Meta e welepakk sibwe kkepasal Refaluwasch rel?

Mwaliyasch Refalawasch nge eghi prisisu sibwe ghuleey bwe iyel yaasch IDENTITY me kkosch me eew malawasch ghisch aramasal Seipel. Sibwe abwaari me amalawa mwaliyasch leel olighat, fatattaral iimw, gangisch nge mwetelo mmwal nge sibwe kki yaali schagh.

When I took linguistic field methods back in grad school, our class worked with a speaker of Saipan Carolinian, which was not well described at the time, although a lot was known about closely related Trukese (now Chuukese). I’ve studied quite a few Austronesian languages, but you really need to be familiar with the Micronesian subgroup of Austronesian before this starts to look very familiar. Nevertheless, here are a few items that strike me.

Ethnonym: The Saipan Carolinian name for themselves is Refaluwasch. The name Carolinian is derived from the Caroline Islands, where the ancestors of today’s Saipan Carolinians came from, probably starting around the 1700s, after the Northern Marianas had been almost entirely depopulated.

Unusual sounds: I believe the Germanic looking sch indicates a retroflex affricate that sounds a bit like Yapese ch or Kosraean sr. The double consonants in word-initial position are a bit unusual and take some getting used to for English speakers who ignore the medial double nn in Japanese konnichi-wa.

Dialects: The Trukic languages form one long dialect chain, where speakers on neighboring islands can understand each other fine, but speakers from farther apart have increasing difficulty. There is no contrast between l and n in most of the dialects. Where this speaker writes aramasal Seipel ‘people of Saipan’, a speaker of a different dialect might write aramasan Seipen. Similarly, the town of Tanapag, settled by a different group of Carolinians, also goes by the name of Tallabwog.

Chamorro

Hafa Na Prisisu Na Ta Praktika I Fino’ Chamorro?

Kumu uniku yu’ na pagton [sic] palao’an gi familia yan todu I dos saina-hu Chamorro, gi anai pa’go mafañagu yu’, hu hungok I sunidon Chamorro despues enao mo’na I fina’na’guen nana-hu yan tata-hu. Este I lengguahen Chamorro impottante na ta tungo’ sa’ I mismo lengguahi-ta dumiklaklara hafa nasion-ta na rasan taotao….

Pot uttimo, prefekto yu’ na patgon Chamorro ya ti bai hu sedi na bai hu maleffa osino bai hu na’ fo’na I otro lengguahi ki I mismo lengguahi-hu Chamorro.

A Spanish reader’s reaction to written Chamorro must be very similar to a Chinese reader’s reaction to written Japanese. The huge number of familiar borrowings let you know the subject matter, but the foreign grammatical framework remains opaque. You know what they’re talking about, but not what they’re saying.

Ethnonym: Many Chamorros prefer to call themselves Chamoru, perhaps especially Guamanian Chamorros, whose orthographic standards (at least at Unibetsidåt Guahan) seem to differ somewhat from those in Saipan.

Unusual sounds: Chamorro ch is pronounced like [ts] (and some capitalize both members of the digraph: CHamoru, like Dutch IJssel); while y is pronounced like [dz]. The apostrophe marks a glottal stop. Spanish syllable-final -r regularly becomes -t and syllable-final -l assimilates to the following consonant.

Grammar: One of my term papers in grad school was an analysis of the historical morphology of Chamorro and Palauan, both of which look more Philippine-like as you go farther back. And both are verb-initial to a significant degree. (So is Yapese, but it’s not very closely related to any other Austronesian language.) But Palauan morphology is far more opaque: with Philippine -in- showing up as -l- and -um- showing up as -o- in some environments. Chamorro is more straightforward. The Spanish loanword diklara, for instance, is both infixed and reduplicated in d-um-iklaklara. Compare Tagalog bili ‘buy’ and one of its inflected forms, b-um-ibili.

Leave a comment

Filed under language, Micronesia, Pacific

by | 24 May 2006 · 1:28 am

Saipan Impressions: Three Meals

No one goes to Saipan or Guam for the cuisine, but I did want to try something localized and not the standard American, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean fare near the major hotels. I had a bit of success, but it wasn’t easy. And I only had three meals to worry about.

Breakfast on the way back to the airport included the obligatory Spam: a Spam & egg sandwich combo (with coffee and donut) at Winchell’s, a U.S. West Coast chain whose menu may have been adapted to Saipan tastes. But I hadn’t expected the huge dollop of mayonnaise that dripped off at every bite (with a little help from me).

My first meal on Saipan was delayed until I returned from a drive to see the sights at the north end of the island, since there was almost nowhere to eat on that stretch of road. So I turned off into the port area on the way back and found the dowdy Seaman’s Restaurant at the end of a pier past a shipwreck listing in the shallows. It was 11 a.m. and I was the only customer—but a hungry one. The Chinese-run restaurant offered a $5 bento with Saipanese characteristics (pictured above). New England clam chowder substituted for miso soup, served with a Korean soup spoon. The rice and sashimi (with wasabi) were Japanese, the beef broccoli Chinese, and the fish jun vaguely Korean (with a wedge of local citrus to squeeze onto it), while the stewed chicken and onion looked like Philippine adobo, but with little pepper and garlic and even less vinegar or bay leaf. The ice tea was served with a squeeze bottle of sugar water, not packets of sugar or sugar substitute. Two orange slices served as a Chinese final course. It was just the sort of motley Pacific Island cuisine I was looking for.

After driving all over the island most of the day, I decided to see if any place looked promising within walking distance near the hotel. Moby Dick answered the call. A chalkboard listed fish kelaguen, a Chamorro dish of soft chunks of boneless raw fish “cooked” in lemon juice and tossed with slices of green and round onion, and sweet and spicy peppers. It was wonderful—and big enough to serve as an appetizer for two people. But I couldn’t resist ordering the local bottomfish catch of the day, either opakapaka or mafuti. I hadn’t heard of mafuti. When I asked what kind of fish it was, the Filipina waitress didn’t know any other name for it but brought it over to show me. I didn’t recognize it, but ordered it grilled. The whole fish came back to me a little bit overcooked, but I demolished most of it anyway. A Tagalog-speaking waiter later explained that “maputi” got its name from being a white fish. Tagalog for ‘white’ is indeed puti, but the fishname appears to be Chamorro, where the word for ‘white’ is a’paka’. So I don’t know what the story is. (More on Chamorro language later.)

Leave a comment

Filed under Micronesia, Pacific

by | 16 June 2005 · 5:18 pm

Algeria: Recycling Terms from the Last War

Beginning in Algeria in July 1993 there were forests burning once again in the Aurès, Algiers was still living under a curfew, terrorist attacks attributed to Islamists were striking police officers and intellectuals, and hundreds of “suspects” remained in detention, sometimes without trial. The Algerian press had begun to mention the “sweep operations,” and the French press added reports from “the underground.” “Terrorism” and “torture” made their reappearance in the vocabulary of all the triumphant communiques, announcing, on the one hand, the “eradication” of the “last armed groups,” and, on the other, “the imminent victory of the Muslim people.” A strange sensation has developed that this is a remake of the war of independence [1954-62]: an impression of déjà vu or “déja entendu.”

Forty years later, the vocabulary is unifying, consolidating the two eras, making them look alike. Has the country, then, entered a second–and identical–Algerian war?

Nothing is less certain. In the first place, in history, formal analogies have but little pertinence if they confine themselves to highlighting the similarity between certain forms, in this case the resurgence of terrible forms of violence. And, in the second place, the Algeria of the 1990s has only a very distant relation to that of 1962.

The country today is highly urbanized; the rural areas no longer play the same role; more than 60 percent of the population is under thirty; and the rate of schooling is very high. The differences could be multiplied, with, at the center, the end of the colonial system, the massive departure of pieds noirs [French colonists], and the political operation of an independent state. It may therefore seem absurd to assert that the same scenario is being repeated. Yet the protagonists in the confrontation–the followers of the ISF [Islamic Salvation Front], the “democrats,” the army–have intentionally adopted the terms inherited from the past of the Algerian War. And that is what is truly of interest–Islamists speaking of “the valorous mujahideen,” wanting to hunt down “the new pieds noirs” who have appropriated the revolution; “democrats” calling the ISF militants “harkis“ [Muslim colonial auxiliaries] who want to crush the Algerian nation. Some circles within the regime have launched campaigns against the “secular assimilationists,” as during the time of the colonial system, when a lost identity had to be reestablished. And all the camps mention a shadowy “party of France” (Hizb França) supposedly destabilizing Algeria.

This mimicry is striking. The memory of the war of independence operates as a factor in the assignment of the roles to be played. The contemporary actors dress in theoretical garments borrowed from the past. But, if they do not realize the novelty of the present, and if they subjectively replay the old situation, it is because they remain under the automatist influence of a memory fabricated forty years ago.

SOURCE: Algeria, 1830-2000: A Short History, by Benjamin Stora (Cornell U. Press, 2001), pp. 232-233

For a more hopeful follow-up, see this OxDem Report from April 2004.

Leave a comment

Filed under Mediterranean, Micronesia, religion, war

by | 29 August 2004 · 12:31 pm

Yapese Spelling Reform: "That Damn Q!"

Like Marshallese speakers at the eastern end of Micronesia, Yapese speakers at the western end seem to be resistant to spelling reforms designed by outside linguists.

The most recent Yapese Bible orthography makes do with only 5 vowels, but writes all the consonants. However, it spells glottal stop inconsistently. A glottal stop is implicit between any two adjacent vowels in a word, as in gaar ‘to say’, which has two syllables with a glottal stop in between. People used to use the same device to indicate final glottals, as in pii ‘to give’, but the most recent Bible orthography now writes the final glottal with an apostrophe, thus pi’. Except on a handful of grammatical forms, like u ‘at’, i ‘he, she, it’, glottal stops are predictable on words written with initial vowels, just as they are in English or German, so the Bible orthography doesn’t write them at all.

In the new orthography, however, the glottal stop is everywhere spelled with a q, and resistance to the new orthography centers on “that damn q” in new spellings like Waqab ‘Yap’, girdiiq ‘people’, qarcheaq ‘bird, bat’, and even Qapriil ‘April’ and Qaawguust ‘August’. (Imagine German Qach, du lieber Qaugustine!)

The decision to use q in place of the apostrophe for glottal stop was motivated by the fact that the apostrophe was already used to indicate a glottalized release on consonants. Yapese, like Navajo, has a whole series of glottalized consonants in addition to plain equivalents in initial, medial, and final position within the word, thus:

p, t, k vs. p’, t’, k’

m, n, ng vs. m’, n’, ng’

f, th, vs. f’, th’

l, y, w vs. l’, y’, w’

So, in theory, it is possible that rung’ag ‘to hear’ might be ambiguous between rung+’ag and the nonexistent forms *ru+ng’ag or *rung’+ag. In practice, this seems to be an awfully weak justification for introducing “that damn q.”

Writing more vowel distinctions, on the other hand, seems well motivated. Yapese distinguishes among 8 long vowels, with a further possibility of 8 short vowels–although length is partially predictable from the position of the vowel in the word. All eight long vowels show up in the following minimal octet, so convenient for linguistic analysis: miil ‘to run’, meel ‘sail rope’, meal [æ] ‘rotten’, mael [a] ‘war’, maal [a] ‘taro type’, mool ‘to sleep’, moel ‘adze handle’, muul ‘to fall’. Using digraphs to write vowels, of course, precludes the old reliance on adjacent vowels to indicate glottal stop.

Examples of the old and new renditions of the most common greeting exchange follows.

  • ‘Where are you going?’

    Old: Ngam man ngan

    New: Nga mu maen ngaan

  • ‘I’m (just) going over there’

    Old: Nggu wan ngaram

    New: Ngu gu waen nga raam

The Pacific Area Language Materials website gives a sample of what the Japanese story Momotaro looks like in the new orthography. Look at all those paragraphs beginning with Q, especially on Qeree ‘and then’, which in the Bible is written Ere.

Once again, a socially optimal orthography in actual use can get by with even fewer alphabetic distinctions than a linguist might desire for the purpose of distinguishing each word in isolation from the sentential, semantic, and social context in which those words are normally used. A simpler, underspecified writing system would allow more Yapese to write their own language without having to run everything by someone with sufficient linguistic training to understand the New Orthography. It would take literacy out of the hands of experts and give it back to the people who need it most.

SOURCES: John Thayer Jensen, Yapese Reference Grammar (Hawai‘i, 1977; out of print) and Yapese-English Dictionary (Hawai‘i, 1977; out of print); Thin Rok Got nib Thothup [‘Word of God that’s Holy’ = the Bible].

3 Comments

Filed under language, Micronesia

by | 25 August 2004 · 10:50 am

Marshallese Spelling Reforms

The public renunciation by several media giants of spelling reforms promulgated in Germany less than a decade ago has generated some discussion in the blogosphere, notably on Rainy Day, Crooked Timber, and a Fistful of Euros, the last two with wide-ranging comment threads.

To take the discussion a little farther afield, I’d like to add a glimpse of what teachers and writers of two Micronesian languages are up against. In Marshallese and Yapese, spelling reforms promulgated in the early 1970s have yet to take hold. (I use “promulgated” to mean ‘imposed by specialists whose expertise is unimpeachable, but whose vision is clouded by thoroughly impractical ideals’.)

In both cases, the new orthographies suffer from two major drawbacks. (1) The only major literature written in each language has been the Bible. One tampers with holy scripture at one’s peril. Just witness how many Christians still stick to the King James Bible or to Latin liturgy. (2) Linguistic experts were overzealously committed to the “one phoneme, one symbol” principle of orthography design. Among all the languages I’ve dabbled in, Marshallese, Yapese, and possibly Nauruan seem the most resistant to any orthography that places that principle above all others.

Here’s a bit of a glimpse at Marshallese. Yapese will follow in another post.

Marshallese can be analyzed as having only four vowel phonemes that differ by height, but whose roundness (oh-ness vs. eh-ness) or backness (uh-ness vs. eh-ness) depend on their neighboring consonants. For instance, the vowel phoneme /e/ can sound like eh (open e), uh (schwa), or oh (o). In the textbook Spoken Marshallese (1969) the vowels are written i, e, a, & (yes, ampersand, but it was later replaced with an ę). The linguist Mark Hale refers to these four phonemes as cup of coffee, telephone, yinyang, and soccer ball, presumably because each word or phrase contains the varying sound values of the respective abstract phoneme.

Marshallese consonants distinguish only three main positions of articulation: lips (p, m), tongue tip (t, n), and tongue back (k, ng). Voicing (t vs. d, p vs. b) is not distinctive, but three secondary articulations are: “light”/palatal (py, my, ly), “heavy”/velar (p, m, l), and rounding (kw, ngw, lw). The parenthetical examples are not orthographic, but only intended to hint at pronunciation differences. One solution is to write the “heavy” consonants as if they were voiced: b, d, g vs. p, t, k, but that doesn’t help with the nasals: m, n, ng (the latter also written g).

The “light” consonants front the neighboring vowels (e > eh), the “heavy” consonants back them (e > uh), and the round consonants round them (e > oh). Two different consonant types on either side can pull the vowel in two different directions, creating dipththongs.

Examples of “improvements” in the 1969 textbook orthography:

  • ‘Hello’

    Old: Yokwe yok

    New: Yi’yaqey y&q

  • ‘I’m going to Ailinglaplap / Jaluit’

    Old: Ij etal ñan Ailinglaplap / Jaluit

    New: Yij yetal gan Hay&l&gļapļap / Jalw&j

Since Marshallese makes too many distinctions for the standard keyboard, a linguistically optimal solution to facilitate literacy in Marshallese could go in either of two directions. The first direction seems by and large to prevail.

  • Write more vowels than strictly necessary in order to keep them less abstract and because vowel diacritics are easier to keyboard, while relying on the neighboring vowels to show some of the consonant distinctions. This allows people to write with lower levels of linguistic or computer literacy.

  • Write only the minimal (four) vowel distinctions, and add diacritics to distinguish all the consonants in order to show the full beauty of the underlying phonological system. This requires higher standards of linguistic and computer literacy before people can write their own language.

I would suggest that a socially optimal orthography might get by with even fewer alphabetic distinctions. People could write fewer vowels and consonants than would be optimal in isolation, while relying instead on sentential, semantic, or social context to reduce ambiguity. But this approach would make linguists feel rather less useful.

A revised Marshallese Bible was published in 2002. I’m not sure which of the several previous orthographic practices it relies on. Marshallese editions of (portions of) the Bible go back to the the 1860s, after the first missionaries had arrived, some of them from Hawai‘i.

Sample PDFs of Marshallese materials in a vowel-rich, consonant-poor orthography are accessible from the Pacific Area Language Materials website.

SOURCES: Heather Willson, A Brief Introduction to Marshallese Phonology (PDF, UCLA); Byron Bender, Spoken Marshallese (Hawai‘i, 1969); R.W.P. Brasington, Epenthesis and deletion in loan phonology (PDF, U. Reading, 1981).

UPDATE: David at Rishon-Rishon examines the question of “social optimality” at greater length, with evidence from Russian and Hebrew, noting that Russian writes consonantal palatalization on the vowels, while Hebrew writes velarization on the consonants.

1 Comment

Filed under language, Micronesia

by | 1 August 2004 · 8:32 am

Micronesian Diary: Meeting House and Eating Turtle, Yap

On 30 January 1999, archaeologist Felicia Beardsley visited a meeting house on the southern tip of Yap, Micronesia, where she ate sea turtle. Her Micronesian Diary entries focus on food as much as archaeology. I like that.

Anoth is at the south end of the island, the south tip. It is a coastal village, and we had been invited to the open house held in honor of the completion of rebuilding their traditional pebaey, or meeting house. The pebaey is right on the coastal flat — well, the entire village is — and immediately on the shore’s edge (not more than 50 meters from the pebaey) is the faluw, the men’s house. The only thing left of the faluw, however, is its foundation. It is a coral foundation, which is gradually eroding into the sea. In effect, the faluw foundation is an archaeological site.

Actually, a very large number of traditional dwellings in Yap were turned into similar archaeological sites by Typhoon Sudal in April 2004. Many people are still living in tents.

In these villages, the pebaey and faluw are used, reused, and rebuilt over time. Their locations generally do not change, so the same structure (or rather foundation) supports several generations of superstructures, all of which follow the same construction plan, with variation only in the decorative elements such as the plaiting in the walls and so on. Both structures are six-sided, and the only difference between the two is that the faluw is closed-walled, and the pebaey is not. That is because the faluw is (or was) used as a dwelling place for young men, where they would learn the skills that would carry them through life, including (but not limited to) fishing, the manufacture of all the tools necessary for fishing, fighting, dancing, oral histories, and of course, sexual skills. Each faluw used to house several girls who were obtained (kidnapped, purchased) from other villages. By contrast, the pebaey is a meeting house, or community house. It did not have need for walls, as it was not a place for permanent dwelling….

Teresa and I were the only girls at the open house; I was told the community had made a conscious decision not to include the women of the community. The festivities included roasting a sea turtle, which I was obliged to try. It really isn’t that bad, and tastes quite good when you eat the meat with the fat. But, as one of the chiefs pointed out, it is not something I am accustomed to eat, so it was of course understandable when I handed what was left on my plate over to someone else.

One of the most valuable phrases any fieldworker or traveller needs to learn is how to say in the local language, “I’m not accustomed to that yet.”

Then he went on to describe the preparation of the turtle, step-by-step, including how its shell is opened when it is basically half-cooked. There are times, he said, when the heart is still beating at this point. This is when the meat and fat is distributed, and several of the organs are removed. After this, the blood of the turtle continues to cook in its shell; it is this cooked blood that this particular chief prefers. Many others at the site also told me they prefer the cooked turtle blood, and could hardly wait until it was done. This same chief has a son whom Teresa was obliged to watch throughout the course of the day. She did a good job, keeping them both out of trouble and out of harm’s way. I think she welcomed this “job” because it kept her occupied….

I also had an opportunity to chat with the chief. What I found interesting is that chiefs like him are raised as chiefs from the time they take their first steps, and that is what he is doing with his son too. He said that he has seen so many changes in the traditions of Yap. Today, he said (and he seemed a little concerned about it), there are people who aren’t chiefs but who want to be. So, sometimes, he said, he just steps back and says, go ahead. Then watches. He said they don’t know how to do it, and they get frustrated and give it up.

The caste system in Yap has driven many talented commoners–and outcastes–to seek their fortunes overseas, many in the U.S. military. (Yapese have served in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq.) But it also seems to have contributed to a healthier fiscal and cultural cautiousness than in some of the other Micronesian states.

Leave a comment

Filed under Micronesia

by | 28 July 2004 · 7:54 pm

Micronesian Diary: Yam Feast in Kitti, Pohnpei

I’ve only just discovered archaeologist Felicia Beardsley’s Micronesian Diary, an illustrated diary of her visits to various parts of Micronesia in 1998-99. Here are excerpts from what she has to say about a yam feast in Kitti Municipality on Pohnpei.

We are supposed to attend and document a traditional feast — the ritual presentation of the yam (and opening of yam season) to the Nahnmwarki [high chief] by one of the villages in Kitti Municipality. That should be interesting….

We arrived to find huge yams hanging from the rafters of the nas [ceremonial house], as well as lined up outside on large racks made especially for such things. In one location outside the nas, there are piles of kava plants (for sakau [= Samoan te kava]) and sugar cane. These were collected by the four sections of the village — sort of a competition. And just outside the nas, an um (earth oven) was well underway — the wood was burning, stones had been piled high and were beginning to be heated. Those stones in the middle of the pile looked as if they were already starting to glow red with heat….

Then, just in front of the um and nas, a line of pigs stretched out on banana leaves. The pigs are killed on-site. Apparently, each village section was also responsible for supplying a pig or pigs (their choice). Someone also laid out a carabao. I am told that in the ranking of animal offerings, dog is the highest ranked, then pigs. Carabao are extras, with no rank. This was the first carabao I had actually seen here, and it was dead. It was almost immediately cut up into little pieces, with a leg offering given to the Nahnmwarki. The pigs are thrown onto the top of the um to burn off the hair, then they are opened up, cleaned and thrown back onto the banana leaves splayed. They and the pieces of carabao are covered up to keep the flies and dogs off of them. There are plenty of dogs wandering around, trying to lick up the blood from these animals….

The food is distributed to everyone; then comes a presentation of fabric and sugar cane. Yams are called (by title) for the um and pigs are placed on the um. These are then presented to the Nahnmwarki. The pigs are cut up, with the pieces distributed to various title holders. Next, the carabao. (We were given a piece of carabao; I gave it to Rosenda. She has a bigger family; besides, I know Teresa [her daughter] would not eat any of it because she saw the animal killed.) …

Finally, the last event of the day: Sakau pounding. All the stones in the nas (there are supposed to be six) are prepared. They are set up on tires and/or coconut husks. The kava is prepared, and the pounding begins. It is quite rhythmic, and in sync. One wonders if there is someone directing the pace of pounding. The whole sound echoes throughout the nas. One stone is pounded by all women; and their companions are dancing and singing, whooping and hollering to the rhythm of the stones. Sakau is traditionally pounded by men, who work with their shirts off. So, when these women were in the process of preparing their stone, one of the men involved in the event told them they had to take their shirts off just like the men because that is the way it is done. They didn’t, and gave him such a scolding that he walked off and left them alone.

Leave a comment

Filed under Micronesia