Pacific Languages Pacific Languages AN INTRODUCTION John Lynch © 1998 University of Hawai‘i Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 98 99 00 01 02 03 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lynch, John Pacific languages: an introduction / [John Lynch]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–8248–1898–9 (alk. paper) 1. Pacific Area—Languages. I. Title. P381.P3L96 1998 499—dc21 97–24552 CIP University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources Designed by Josie Herr This book is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits readers to freely download and share the work in print or electronic for- mat for non-commercial purposes, so long as credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. The Creative Commons license described above does not apply to any material that is separately copyrighted. Please refer to the credit lines and source nota- tions in the book to determine the copyright holders for images and other third- party material. The open-access ISBNs are 9780824842581 (PDF) and 9780824881832 (EPUB). The open-access editions of this publication were made possible by The Univer- sity of the South Pacific (USP) OER Course Conversion Grant. This competitive funding program is open to all USP faculty and staff wishing to integrate open materials into mainstream teaching and learning. To Andonia, Brendan, and Steven Contents Illustrations x Preface xiii Acknowledgments xvii Terms Used xix Chapter 1 Linguistics: Some Basic Concepts 1 1.1. The Structure of Language 1 1.2. Common Grammatical Categories and Functions 5 1.3. Reconstructing Linguistic History 9 Part 1: Geography and History 21 Chapter 2 The Languages of the Pacific 23 2.1. How Many Languages? 23 2.2. Linguistic Demography 27 2.3. Language Names 40 2.4. A Brief History of Pacific Language Research 41 Chapter 3 The History of the Austronesian Languages 45 3.1. The Austronesian Family 45 3.2. The Oceanic Languages 46 VII VIII Contents 3.3. The Settlement of Oceania 51 3.4. Reconstructing Culture 58 Chapter 4 The History of the Papuan and Australian Languages 60 4.1. Interrelationships of Papuan Languages 61 4.2. Interrelationships of Australian Languages 68 4.3. Possible External Links 69 4.4. Implications for Prehistory 69 Part 2: Structure 73 Chapter 5 Sound Systems 75 5.1. Oceanic Languages 75 5.2. Papuan Languages 87 5.3. Australian Languages 91 5.4. Orthographies 94 5.5. Summary 99 Chapter 6 Oceanic Languages: Grammatical Overview 100 6.1. Pronouns 100 6.2. Nouns and Noun Phrases 105 6.3. Possessive Constructions 122 6.4. Verbs and the Verb Complex 130 6.5. Sentences 148 6.6. Similarities and Differences 165 Chapter 7 Papuan Languages: Grammatical Overview 166 7.1. Pronouns 166 7.2. Nouns and Noun Phrases 169 7.3. Possessive Constructions 171 7.4. Verbs and the Verb Complex 172 7.5. Sentences 177 Chapter 8 Australian Languages: Grammatical Overview 185 8.1. Pronouns 185 8.2. Nouns and Noun Phrases 187 8.3. Possessive Constructions 194 8.4. Verbs and the Verb Complex 195 8.5. Sentences 198 Contents IX Part 3: The Social and Cultural Context 203 Chapter 9 Languages in Contact 205 9.1. The Social Context of Language Contact 205 9.2. The Linguistic Effects of Contact 208 9.3. Three Case Studies 213 9.4. Historical Implications 218 Chapter 10 Pidgins, Creoles, and Koines 220 10.1. Pidginization, Creolization, and Koineization 220 10.2. Melanesian Pidgin 221 10.3. The Pidgins of the Motu Traders 232 10.4. Fiji Hindi 235 Chapter 11 Language, Society, and Culture in the Pacific Context 237 11.1. The Vocabulary of Pacific Languages 237 11.2. Counting Systems 244 11.4. Languages in Use 256 11.5. Language Use in Pacific Nations 261 11.6. Shift, Survival, Death, Revival 268 Conclusion Ideas about Pacific Languages 272 Suggestions for Further Reading 279 Appendices 283 1. Data Sources 285 2. Phonetic Symbols 291 3. Sample Phoneme Systems 295 4. Glossary of Technical Terms 299 Notes 313 References 321 Index 345 Illustrations Tables 1. Pacific languages by region and country 2. Polynesian Outliers 3. Languages of Melanesia 4. Papuan language families 5. Anejom̃ pronouns 6. Baniata independent pronouns Figures 1. Genetic relationship 2. Subgroups of a family 3. Subgroups of Proto East-Central Papuan 4. Establishing migration patterns 5. Time limits on comparative linguistics 6. An Austronesian family tree 7. The Polynesian subgroup 8. Partial classification of Anejom̃ terms for marine life 9. A moiety system 10. Njamal kinship terms 11. Anejom̃ kinship terms X Illustrations XI Maps 1. Reconstructing migration patterns 2. The Pacific 3. Languages of Polynesia 4. Languages of Micronesia 5. Languages of Fiji and Rotuma 6. New Caledonia 7. Vanuatu 8. Solomon Islands 9. Papua New Guinea 10. Irian Jaya 11. Australia 12. Austronesian languages 13. Oceanic subgroups in Melanesia 14. Austronesian migrations 15. Papuan language families 16. Possible wider groupings of Papuan families Preface This book was born out of frustration. I have lost count of the number of times people have asked me to recommend to them a “good general book on the languages of the Pacific.” There are any number of good specialist or technical books on the Austronesian languages as a whole, or on the Papuan languages, or on Australian languages, or on certain subgroups or individual languages—but virtually all of these are aimed at readers who have studied a considerable amount of linguistics. There are, however, many nonlinguists who want or need to know some- thing about the languages of this region. Language is an important topic of conversation, an important political and social phenomenon, in many if not all Pacific countries and territories. Pacific peoples want to know more about their languages—what other languages they are related to, where they came from, how they compare with, say, English and French, what the other lan- guages in the region are like. People working in Pacific countries need some general information on the languages of the country or the region to assist them in their work and in their appreciation of the cultures and societies of the Pacific. Teachers, sociologists, community workers, government offi- cers, high school and university students—all are affected by language, and most would like to know more. Hence this book. It has been a long time in the making, but I hope that it will serve a useful purpose. I have tried to steer a middle course between being too simplistic and being too technical. Obviously, to provide detailed coverage in any book of the sound systems and grammars of fourteen hun- dred languages, their interrelationships and connections with languages outside the region, their history and current status, and the relationships between language, culture, and social organization is quite impossible. XIII XIV Preface What I have tried to do is to give the general reader a feel for what these languages are like (with a minimum of references) and at the same time offer linguists something to get their teeth into (with references to sources they can follow up). The book has three major sections. Part 1 describes the geographical distribution of Pacific languages and attempts to summarize what is known of their history. Part 2 is an overview of the phonological and grammatical structure of these languages. This discussion is far from exhaustive. Many areas (e.g., complex sentences) and many thorny problems (e.g., the Polyne- sian “passive”) are omitted or glossed over. But there is enough information to give a general picture of what Pacific languages are like, in what ways they are similar, and how they differ both from each other and from met- ropolitan languages like English or French. Part 3 looks at the relationship between Pacific societies and cultures and their languages from a number of different points of view. In the Pacific as elsewhere, language is very much a social and cultural phenomenon. The careful reader will notice a bias toward Oceanic languages in part 2. This results partly from my own professional background and partly from the fact that, while there are good general surveys of Papuan and Australian languages (Foley 1986 and Dixon 1980), there is nothing comparable for Oceanic languages. The orthography I use in citing language data is generally the standard orthography of the language. For languages lacking such an orthography, I have used a standard set of phonetic symbols (see appendix 2). This has often meant modifying the orthography of the original sources. Similarly, I have consistently used the same name for the same language, even when some sources use different names. Phrase and sentence examples are presented as shown below. Fijian E ā rai-ci irau na yalewa na cauravou. he PAST see- (TRANS) them:two the woman the youth ‘The young man saw the two women.’ • The first line, in italics, is the phrase or sentence in that language, with hyphens marking morpheme breaks within a word; underlin- ing is used to focus on the particular aspect of grammar being discussed (in this example, the transitive suffix -ci). • The second line is a word-by-word and morpheme-by-morpheme translation. Where a single morpheme expresses more than one item of meaning, these are separated by a colon (thus irau ‘the Preface XV two of them’ is glossed as ‘them:two’).