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THE WITU GRAMMAR OF CULTURE ...... 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION ...... 1 ZENITH ICONIC SCHEMA: THE FINAL SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF DEATH ...... 17 THE ALLOMORPHS MATE AND MATA OF THE WITU VERB ROOT ‘TO PLANT ’ ...... 17 THE ALLOMORPHS TAKUTA AND TAGUTA OF THE WITU TERM ‘CARDINAL 2’...... 18 The biological father and homeland of the second seed ...... 19 THE THIRD PAIR OF TERMS PADAGO AND PANAGO : A CERTAIN MAN , THE MAN OF LIGHT DOOMED TO DIE 21 THE FOURTH PAIR OF TERMS : THE TWO FORMS LATA AND LATE OF THE WITU VERB ROOT MEANING ‘TO RECOVER ONE ’S LIFE FORCE ’...... 21 THE FIFTH PAIR OF TERMS : THE TWO FORMS OF THE ‘PERSONAL EXEMPLARY ’ CLITIC -LAWE AND -LOE ... 22 The Witu Grammar of Culture General Introduction
This general introduction has been written for final year High School and university students and graduates from the Witu and other Papua New Guinea language groups. The Witu have two complementary language systems i) the common language system of communication of information, and ii) the metalanguage system of communication of information. The two systems are subsumed under a single unifying system referred to as The Akolali Centric Relationship Schema. This seems to give priority to the metalanguage system which is not intended since one can only discover and arrive at an understanding of this higher level overarching system through the common language and the culture in general. We will discover that the Witus’ common language and the culture in general are relationship-focused systems. Once this is discovered and it is realised that both are congruently governed by what the anthropologist Hallpike called Heraclitian principles, it is also discovered that an understanding of the relationship-focused organisation of both has remarkable explanatory powers. The analysis, in other words, becomes more than a description. It becomes an explanation of how the Witu conceive of the nature of their language, their society, the world in which they live and the protective sky-covered universe at large. We will discover that since the Witus’ focus of attention is on relationships, prototypically binary relationships between physical entities and binary relationships between events involving the entities, they have developed quite remarkable pre-scientific cognitive abilities We will discover that they know that space and time are not independent of each other but are simply different aspects of something more fundamental, which the Western world, since Einstein’s time, refers to as space-time. We will discover that while the Western world only learns about this in higher level
2 education, and most members acquire it for the most part as intellectual baggage, the Witu and other members of the Trans New Guinea Phylum of language groups, live by such intuitive knowledge. We will also discover that the Witu are cognitively aware of the fact that articulate messages have to be superimposed on vibrating carrier waves for their transmission. The Witu are not only cognitively aware of such things. They also encode this knowledge in their metalanguage. In other words, they show that they know that they know. They qualify in every respect to be recognised not just as members of the species homo sapiens ‘man who knows’ but more correctly as members of the species homo sapiens sapiens ‘man who knows that he knows’: they show to others through their metalanguage that they know that they know. The relationship of the common language to the metalanguage is more or less the equivalent of the relationship between i) the language of physics, the science that deals with the material world, and the material universe in general, and ii) the language of metaphysics that deals with the world of the spirit . This analogy may seem either trivial or presumptuous or both, since the language of physics, like the language of the hard sciences in general, is governed by rigorous principles. The analysis must, at least in theory, if not always in practice, be objective, not subjective. In other words, the analyst must be reacting objectively to the evidence, and not reading things into the evidence. The physicist, who represents the first stage in the acquisition of knowledge about the world and the universe at large, has a great advantage over the linguist and the anthropologist who cannot experiment with the evidence. He also has had the advantage of increasingly sophisticated tools for discovering that the principles governing the potentially open ended complexity of his field of interest are both extremely simple and extremely powerful. No one today doubts the existence of the atom, and the inner organisation of the atom with its proton, electron and neutron. Mendeleev’s simple essentially two-dimensional Periodic Table had both descriptive and predictive powers. An empty cell in the two-dimensional matrix pointed to the existence of an element yet to be discovered, and determined much of its most important properties before it was discovered. The principle governing the systematic relationship of the elements to each other within the matrix was very simple. It was the binary relationship between two systematic opposites: the positive proton and the negative electron. Both jointly had a systematic relationship with the third member of the triad, the neutron, whose behaviour, beginning with the neutron of deuterium, hydrogen 2, was critical in the first phase of the generation of all the other elements by a totally systematic
3 progression step by step through every cell in the Mendeleev Periodic Table. The biologist, who represents the second stage in the acquisition of knowledge, now restricted to the world of living things, has also, since the time of Mendel, had a great advantage over the linguist and the anthropologist who cannot experiment with the evidence. He also has had the advantage, since the time of Mendel, of increasingly sophisticated tools for discovering that the principles governing the potentially open ended complexity of his field of interest are both extremely simple and extremely powerful. No one, today, doubts the existence of the gene, and the alphabet of four nitrogenous bases that operate in pairs, cytosine and guanine as one pair, and thymine and adenine as the other pair. There remains the third stage in the acquisition of knowledge, now restricted to one species of the biological world, homo sapiens ‘man who knows ’. This field of knowledge is the domain of the linguist and the anthropologist and accompanying disciplines embraced by the cov7er term, the social sciences. It has had, until quite recently, only one discovery tool, language itself. It has, and will, undoubtedly remain the most sophisticated of all investigative tools. But here we are faced with the problem of the tool investigating itself. Until the tool itself is understood it remains paradoxically a weak implement. While hundreds of PhDs have sought to produce a definitive grammar of just one language (their mother tongue, English, for the majority of them), there is still no such grammar in existence. The dilemna is simple. First there has been the implicit supposition that language is so complex, that its potential open ended complexity, far in excess of the potential open ended complexity of the biological world of living creatures, cannot be governed by such elementary binary principles as those governing the potential open ended productiveness of the universal binary relationship between the proton and electron of the physical universe, and the universal binary relationship between the two pairs of nitrogenous bases of the gene of the biological world. Secondly, the linguist and the anthropologist have been handicapped by the nature of their subject matter. People cannot be experimented with and manipulated like the product of the atoms in the physical world and the product of the genes in the plant and animal world. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, language which has begotten culture, has been able to create culture by virtue of the break between the form and function of words. So long as the sound, however great the potential for variation of sound, was the message, there was no possibility for language to develop. Not even the highest of the primates, the
4 chimpanzee, could progressively build up a repertoire of words and syntax so that they could speak between themselves about each other and about their world at large. For them, the sound was fundamentally the message. How, then, could the linguist studying language, and using language as his tool, hope to see behind the random shape of the form and the random relationship between a form and its meaning or function to discover the equivalent of a binary system governing the communication of meaningful information. What tool, if any, might the linguist have at his command for such a task? Richard Pittman believed that he had found such an analytical and explanatory tool in Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a theory of language. He had been an ardent student of nature since childhood, and continued this interest to the end of his life. It found expression in his article Nuclear Structures in Linguistics. Pittman was intrigued by the power of Hjelmslev’s suggestion i) that language was governed by three relationship-focused primes, and ii) that paradigmatic relationships and syntactic relationships were different manifestations of these primes. For Pittman, whose study of language was motivated by the principles enunciated in his article Nuclear Structures in Linguistics , Hjelmslev’s three function primes held promise that language could be shown to be governed by the same kind of elementary principles as those with which he was familiar in the physical and biological sciences. He presumed that the apparent open ended complexity of language, manifested in the remarkable diversity of languages, would prove to be governed by a very elementary but powerful system. Martin Joos included Pitman’s article, Nuclear Structures in Linguistics in his volume Readings in Linguistics (1957). Joos’s editor’s note at the end of Pittman’s article is significant: “If enough more papers like this had been published, I wouldn’t have needed to say so much in my comments scattered through this book, for my purpose has mostly been the same as Pittman’s, plus a historical one”. H. J. Uldall highlights the significance of Hjelmslev’s theory of language in the following words in a five page article titled On Equivalent Relations (source unknown). “Of the many concepts which Louis Hjelmslev has brought to the theory of language, surely one of the most fruitful is that of the direction of functions, the differentiation of determination, interdependence, and constellation. It is a concept of such simplicity and generality that its scope seems potentially much wider than its application to linguistic studies alone . Within linguistics itself it has already proved its usefulness by bringing together under one explanation “syntactic,” “morphological,” and “phonetic” phenomena which before seemed totally unconnected.” (the underlining has been added)
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There was, however, a problem with the effective application of Hjelmslev’s relationship-focused theory of language. Hjelmslev’s theory would be an effective tool for the analysis of those language groups whose languages and cultures in general were indeed relationship- focused. The anthropologist Hallpike, however, highlighted the fact that there were two fundamentally different types of language groups: those that were relationship-focused and those that were entity focused. At this point the following observation of the Harvard anthropologist, Maybury-Lewis, is highly relevant in his editorial chapter, The Quest for Harmony, in the book The Attraction of Opposites, Thought and Society in the Dualistic Mode. "Our problem, then, is to understand the panhuman interest in polarity that led to the development of dualistic philosophies and of binary social systems independently of each other all over the world . It is also to understand why such systems tend to disappear in the course of modernisation .
“The attractiveness of dualistic thinking lies, then, in the solution it offers to the problem of ensuring an ordered relationship between antitheses that cannot be allowed to become antipathies. It is not so much that it offers order, for all systems of thought do that, but that it offers equilibrium. Dualistic theories create order by postulating harmonious interaction between contradictory principles. The existence of fundamental antithesis is everywhere perceived as being part of human existence in this world . Dualistic theories insist that these antitheses do not tear the world apart, and humankind with it, because they are part of a cosmic scheme in which they are harmonized .” (p: 14-15) (underlining added) We now note that Hjelmslev’s dualistic relationship-focused theory of language is essentially what the anthropologist Hallpike has called a Heraclitian theory, not an Aristotelian theory. The difference between these two philosophies is particularly well defined by his analysis of the Tauade Papuan society, in his book Blood and Vengeance in the Papuan Mountains The Generation of Conflict in Tauade Society . He drew attention to the difference between (dualistic) relationship-focus ed societies such as the Tauade, a Goilalan language group of the Binanderean Stock of the South-Eastern Trans-New Guinea Phylum of languages and object or entity-focused societies such as the Konso of Ethiopia. He had first studied the Konso of Ethiopia governed by what he called Aristotelian principles. He wrote the following. “….One of the basic features of Aristotle’s metaphysics was its distinction between Form and Matter, such that each individual thing is the manifestation of its Form. ‘Matter then is simply the element of possibility, of changeableness in things. Form is the stable, knowable, scientifically definable element of things.’ (Armstrong 1965: 79.). For Heraclitus, on the other hand, reality is a world of perpetual change and conflict, ‘a world in which all things are subject to the law of perpetual change, and die continually into each other’s life, and in which the only possible harmony is a delicate and precarious tension of opposing stresses…’ (Armstrong 1965: 11.) The distinction between these two philosophical systems can perhaps be expressed in a different way, by saying that the world consists of various kinds of entities, and of relations (interactions, that is) between those entities, Aristotle holding that it is types of entity which are fundamental, while Heraclitus believes that relationships are .
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“Those societies which conceive actions and relationships between individuals as basic, and for which groups, in so far as they exist, are the product or precipitate of actions and relationships, I call Heraclitian. Those societies, on the other hand, which treat groups and categories as primary realities and actions and relationships as deriving from the nature of these groups and categories, I call Aristotelian. Truly Aristotelian or Heraclitian societies are those which not only possess the appropriate orientation, but whose social organisation is also ordered in terms of it. Societies may be atomistic or corporate for many other reasons besides their cognitive orientation. ….. But I was fortified in my belief that such a distinction between societies is meaningful and important by the discovery that the linguist Capell, in A Survey of New Guinea Languages, makes a similar one. He distinguishes languages in terms of whether they are ‘object-dominated’ or ‘event-dominated’. In making this distinction he refers to an interesting observation by Kaplan: One of the basic divisions that is made among explicit philosophies, and I would suppose it expresses a basic division also among thought worlds or conceptual categories that people themselves employ, is…between…those for whom the world is fundamentally a matter of processes and events and happenings, and those for whom the world is fundamentally a matter of objects or things or substances.” (in Language and Culture, ed. Hoijer 1954, p. 207.)” The problem for linguists and anthropologists from technologically advanced (modernised) Indo European societies studying Highland Papua New Guinea languages and cultures is focused by this difference between the philosophies of Heraclitus and Aristotle cited by Hallpike. Hjelmslev’s relationship-focused theory of language, however, was not entirely adequate for the explanatory analysis of such a Trans New Guinea language as Witu. A fourth function prime, now named Symbiotic- dependency, had to be added to the three primes postulated by Hjelmslev. The existence of the fourth function prime was first postulated by Robert Young in 1963 and approved by Kenneth Pike during the first workshop run by Pike for the Papua New Guinea Branch of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Kenneth Pike, Professor Linguistics at Ann Arbor Michigan, who recruited Harland Kerr into the Summer Institute of Linguistics, invited the author to audit his consultant session with Young when Young dealt with what he called the monofocal-polyfocal dichotomy of the relationship between Bena-Bena free personal pronouns and the sentence-final predicate verb of which they were the subject. The nature of this dichotomy is summarised briefly in section 1.1. of Young’s article The Primary Verb of Bena-Bena in Verb Studies In Five New Guinea Languages 1964 pp. 47-51. Its relevance to Witu is dealt with by the author of this manuscript in his article A Theory Of Language Organisation Based On Hjelmslev’s Function Oriented Theory of Language (Kerr: 1987:101-121). The fourth function prime, now named Symbiotic-dependency, conflates the function of Hjelmslev’s second and third function primes, now referred to as interdependency and independency respectively. Fr. Bill Fey D.Phil., now Bishop Fey, first drew the author’s attention to this during a discussion of the theory at Port Moresby. He indicated that the fourth relationship- focused function prime was, in fact, not a totally new prime. It was nascent in Hjelmslev’s system of three basic primes.
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The addition of the fourth relationship-focused function prime, symbiotic- dependency, resulted in a totally binary system of primes. This system of primes was found to congruently govern both what the Witu said, the traditional domain of Linguistics, and what the Witu people did, the traditional domain of Anthropology. The two systems were melded into a single unified system best identified as the Witu Grammar of Culture. The Witu Grammar of Culture is presented, along with other tables, in a separate file as a Pitman Quartered Square. The Pittman Quartered Square (PQS) is named after Dr. Richard Pittman who introduced the Harland Kerr to Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena To A Theory of Language in 1954 and urged the importance of relationship as the key to the organisation of language. He also drew Harland Kerr’s attention to the explanatory value of the Punnett Quartered Square used by, and later named after, the geneticist Punnett to explain the rules of Mendelian inheritance in the early history of Genetics. The Witu Grammar of Culture is expounded by a PQS system of four primary PQS subsystems listed below. Figure 1 The Witu Grammar of Culture: its four primary PQS subsystems 1] Personal Identification PQS System 2] Interpersonal Relationship PQS System 3] Embodiment Realisation PQS System 4]] Protective Recovery PQS System At this point we are particularly concerned with the significance of the bridge of transition from the second to the third of the primary PQS Systems, i.e. from the Interpersonal Relationship to the Embodiment Realisation PQS System of the Witu Grammar of Culture. Each of these two PQS subsystems is itself expounded by four lower level PQS subsystems, which show how PQS systems nest within PQS systems. Figure 2 The Interpersonal Relationship PQS system 1] Four Free personal pronoun PQS systems 2] Classificatory Kinship PQS system 3] Authority PQS system 4]] The Yomini-iconic PQS system Figure 3 The Embodiment Realisation PQS System 1] The Language-Communication PQS System 2] The District-Society PQS System 3] The Land-Life (Surival) PQS System 4]] The Religio-Spirit PQS System The bridge of transition from the second to the third primary subsystems of the Witu Grammar of Culture is from the last subsystem of the former (the Yomini Iconic system) to the first subsystem of the latter (the Language- Communication system). Figure 4 The Yomini Iconic PQS System 1] yomini as living spirit 2] yomini as reflection 3] yomini as shadow 4 ]] yomini as man made symbol: carving painting The Yomini Iconic system is itself a PQS system. It is a PQS system expounded by four different referents of the Witu lexical term yomini . Its first three referents are natural referents. They encode each living person
8 as a monofocal trinity of universal distinctive features, the creative product of Akolali. The fourth referent of the Witu lexical term yomini is the bifocal referent, a man-made symbol, the product of a person working with wood or some other workable material. The Witu term yomini would be identified today as a single morpheme by a professional orthodox linguist. However, with the discovery of the metalanguage encoded into the common language studied by linguists, it became apparent that it could be broken into two parts each with its own subliminal (hidden/coded) meaning. At some earlier stage in the history of the Witu language a member or members of the language group devised this term to encode metalinguistic information. It can now be recognised as the product of the following pair of what are called submorphemic constituents (SMCs). yomini
9 kolotini ‘liver’, are part of a set of three words that encode the pro- creation of vulnerable children who need protection. We now note that the first SMC < yo > of the Witu term yomini is related to the Witu term yo that signifies a ‘black palm’. In this context it encodes the erect trunk of the black palm as a phallic symbol. It is standing at the edge of a mine ‘lake’ (a female icon) encoded by the second SMC
10 made. He had previously made a carving in memory of his father killed in inter clan warfare. It is from this point in the Witu Grammar of Culture PQS system, the yomini as a man-made arbitrary representation of the person symbolised, that it moves from its second primary PQS subsystem, the Interpersonal Relationship subsystem to its third primary subsystem, the Embodiment Realisation PQS subsystem, whose first subsystem is the Language- Communication PQS subsystem. The Language-Communication PQS subsystem is the system where a language form and the thing represented by that form, for example a bird, become independent and arbitrarily related the one to the other. It is the independence of the relationship between a form and its function that is critical to the development of articulate language. It permits potential open ended multiplication and diversity of languages and cultures generated by them. But while such open endedness has potential for the break down in particular binary relationships it is still governed by universal binary principles. Consistent with this, the Language-Communication PQS System is ultimately the product of triangulated relationships whose base-line is that established between two persons. The first person is ego, the focal person, the current speaker, in a conversational relationship with a second person, the addressee. The role of the 1 st and 2 nd persons is self defining, precisely known and determined. Each knows who the other is and what their spatial relationship is vis-à-vis the other. A 3 rd person about whom they are speaking constitutes the vertex of the triangle whose base-line is the 1 st person-2nd person space-based relationship. Each of the two persons of this base-line takes the equivalent of an independent bearing on this 3 rd person to establish that person’s identity and what is known about that person. In fundamentally the same way a surveyor takes independent readings on the third point of a triangle from both ends of the base-line whose spatial relationship to each other has been precisely determined. It is in such a way that individuals acquire knowledge from each other and pass it on to each other. This, then, highlights one of the most important guiding principles in determining the exponent of each cell of any PQS system of relationships, person-based, space-based, time-based or type number-based. The filler of any cell in a PQS system is not accepted as the valid exponent of the function prime governing that particular cell until evidence from two quite independent sources justifies it. it can then safely be assumed that the conclusion has not been imposed on the data by the personal bias of the analyst but is rather a valid response to the data itself. Three or more
11 independent sources of evidence converging on the same point add increasing proof that the analysis is valid at that point. Triangulation is the process that lies behind the three-dimensional mapping of the world and the universe at large. The most relevant aspect is defined as follows in the Collins English Dictionary, Updated Third Edition (1995:1642). “3. the fixing of an unknown point, as in navigation, by making it one vertex of a triangle, the other two being known.” Harland Kerr did a short course on surveying during his four year undergraduate course to gain a BScAgr degree from the Faculty of Agricultural Science at the University of Sydney.) In the process of triangulating discovery, the Witu metalanguage was found to be the equivalent of a vast jigsaw of organically interlocking pieces. Their interlocking also constituted the equivalent of an unbroken network of tracks or the network of loops of a string net bag -- both signified in Witu by the same term ka -- both the product of human activity. This accounts for the second of the three major distinctive features of the Trans New Guinea Phylum of languages the Track-Door iconic schema. The binary relationship between the space-based terminals at either end of a track or road and the track itself is so intimate that the track itself and its terminals are not distinguished lexically but are signified by the same term in many geographically widely distributed languages of the phylum. Distinctive feature 2: the Track-Door Iconic schema “The items road, passage, opening, hole are semantically closely related. ... They also occur as the second constituent in many compounds which denote an opening or passage of some sort, such as door, bridge, unoccupied seat, ear.” (pp. 76-77 Item 32 Road) This distinctive feature highlights the fact that TNG languages are relationship-governed. The focus of attention is on the relationship between the two terminals of a track, and not on the track or the door. By contrast, in an Indo-European language like English, the track and the door are reacted to as different things. They are represented by different forms and entered at different places in the dictionary without any necessary reference to the other. One language, Enga, embraced by the Kewa people group in the Witu myth of the origin of language and death, has at least nine words that signify both a track and its terminals, doors or residential animal holes. Each is different in form from the other, often radically different (see Lang’s Enga Dictionary 1973 p. 29.) káita kainámbu kaitíní kakuíta kátí yané yanéi nokálé nakálé The third Enga term kaitíní is cited by Lang (p. 103) as a synonym of the Enga term tíi which means a ‘hole in something’. The following are typical examples from other TNG languages (see Franklin and Franklin Kewa Dictionary 1978 p. 204, Whitby, Sisinama, Aseani p. 24
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Dadibi Tok Pisin English Po Dage Dabe Dadibi Dictionary 1990 and Fasu (Námo Me) – English Dictionary 1981 p. 77). pora path door Kewa tu road door Dadibi sunumi road door Dadibi Íkia kára road track doorway Fasu dan road door (Hepner) In other instances, in line with the above extract from McElhanon and Voorhoeve, the terms for ‘track’ and ‘door’ are not identical but share a common SMC, as listed below. (See Studies in New Guinea Linguistics by Members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics New Guinea Branch 1962 Published by the University of Sydney, Australia Rosemary p. 102 The Phonemes of Kanite, Kamano, BenaBena and Gahuku.) ’kapo path ‘kafe door BenaBena ‘kana path ‘kafa door Kamano aka path akahe door Asaro ka path kago door Witu The SMC < ka > is common to each of the above terms. Consistent with the binary relationship-focused organization of TNG languages there are two tracks. One is a real space-based track made and travelled by mortal beings. The other is a virtual (invisible) track linking Akolalii resident at the matai ‘zenith’ to the world below. It would be down this track that the special seed-child would enter the world at noon during an equinox to be the solution to the problem of death for disobedient mortal people. He would be the bearer and the embodiment of a message from his father, symbolically resident at the zenith. He would leave behind an unoccupied seat. The message he brought would be received through the hole of the ear of those obedient enough to accept it. This accounts for the metalinguistic information encoded by the pair of SMCS of the Witu term kale of the following Witu noun expression. kale kene < ka le kene > hole of the ear
13 feature that was responsible for the function of the first two distinctive features. This brings us back to the bridge or track that links i) the Yomini Iconic PQS system, the last PQS system of the second primary PQS system of the Witu Grammar of Culture, the Interpersonal Relationship PQS system, to ii) the Language-Communication PQS system, the first subsystem of the third primary PQS system of the Witu Grammar of Culture, the Embodiment Realisation PQS system. The phallic yo ‘black palm’ in casting its yomini ‘reflection’ on the still enclosed surface of a female mine ‘lake’ encodes the pro-creation of a child. The projection of the yomini ‘reflection’ along the track/bridge from the black palm to the lake is captured by the following Witu term for a ‘mirror’. yomini poko yomini po k o> mirror reflection go present 3sg> This Witu term for a ‘mirror’ means literally ‘the reflection has gone’ onto/into the lake. This is why the first Highland Papua New Guineans were so worried when the first Europeans appeared and took their photographs. They believed that the photographs had captured their reflections. This accounts for the fact that the word that means ‘reflection’ in the language of the Dadibi people group to the east of the Witu (studied by Neil Anderson of the Summer Institute of Linguistics) means ‘personal effect’ when it occurs with the word bidi that means ‘man’. noma reflection noma bidi (reflection man’ a personal effect The male yo ‘black palm’ and the female mine ‘lake’ are the terminals of the trajectory of the yomini ‘reflection’ projected from yomini ‘living spirit’ of the palm. The intimacy of the relationship between these two terminals, with its overtones of pro-creation, account for the fact that the TNG Folopa language group, near neighbours to the Witu, use virtually the same term for the ‘black palm’ and a ‘pond’, the equivalent of a lake. kelá pond kelá species of black palm This pair of Folopa terms is related to the term kela of the following Witu noun expression. kela pawe (barrier fence) token short fence at one end of a men’s residential hamlet The kela pawe ‘kela fence’ is the small token fence of very short stakes on the main entry end of a men’s residential hamlet. It that marks one end of the track that leads into and through the men’s village. It was so important that when the people of the Kauo Witu district turned their men’s village zone into a village accommodating married couples and
14 families they still retained a very small kela pawe , only about 2’ high at one end of their village. There is a simple but very important reason why the Witu term kela of the expression kela pawe ‘barrier fence’ is related to the terms for ‘pond’ and ‘species of black palm’ in Folopa. When the yomini ‘living spirit’ of the yo ‘black palm’ projects itself as a yomini ‘reflection’ onto the still surface of the mine ‘lake’ it has to cross a barrier. That barrier is the perimeter of the lake. That barrier defines the identity of the lake. It separates the lake from the black palm. The product of the conjunction of the black palm and the lake is a third person, the child that is pro-created by the union. The product is a three dimensional embodied being. Once embodied the child begins to have a ‘past’ as it grows and travels along a progressively longer and longer track through time until the moment that Akolali had determined life should end when he first fixed the double helix po ‘twine’ of spirit life to that person at birth. All this explains why the Witu noun ka that signifies a ‘track’, and that functions as the first SMC < ka > of the Witu term for a ‘door’, kago , also functions as the Witu term ka that signifies a ‘string net bag’, an icon for pregnancy. This is why the Witu noun ka that has these two functions is also related in the metalanguage to the Witu verb root ka that means ‘to be standing (for a period of time)’ in the following Witu verb expression. Mati kako . < mati ka k o > She (the woman) is pregnant.
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This brings us back to another term that is related to the pair of Folopa nouns kelá ‘pond’ and kelá ‘species of black palm’ that encoded the intimate relationship of the male palm and the female lake that received its reflection as a symbol for the pro-creation of a child, the temporary solution to the problem of death. This term is the word hela of the following Gahuku noun expression (see Deibler 1963:23). hela iza < hela iza> wild pig
16 each other. This irregularity identifies it as a very important feature of the metalanguage whose primary theme is the irregularity of the entry of death into the world Akolali created. But this theme has a counter theme. It is the permanent solution to the problem of death for the Witu. This irregular Witu verb root lati represents the third distinctive feature of language of the Trans New Guinea Phylum. It will be found that it is the distinctive feature that accounts for an explains the function of the other two distinctive features. Distinctive feature 3: the Re-pairing of a broken relationship lati to create lati to re-pair in an Indo-European language like English, these two activities would be reacted to as different activities. The verb meaning to create would be entered in a different part of an English dictionary from the verb meaning to ‘repair’. But since Witu is a TNG relationship-focused language, the focus of attention is on the relationship between two important events. They are the terminals of a track through time, the metalinguistic equivalent of the terminals of a track through space. The terminals and the track, whether space-based or time-based, is so intimate and important that the same verb signifies both the initial event, the creation, and the final event, the re-pairing of the broken relationship between created people and their creator that resulted in the irregular intrusion of death. The track between these two terminal events would be mapped out historically by generations of mortal beings, whose mortality was the consequence of their disobedience according to their short but powerful myth of the origin of language and death. This Witu verb root lati meaning ‘to create’ and also ‘to repair’, has what can be called its metalinguistic cognate in many TNG languages. They are so widely distributed geographically that this unusual verb must date back to the time of origin of the phylum. But the form this term takes in TNG languages which retain it is never the same even in geographically contiguous languages. Enga, in fact, has three terms, listed below, with this paradoxical pair of meanings (Lang: 113). wapuingí to make/create to fix (= to-repair) wái lyíngi to make/create to fix wasingí to make/create to fix Each of the above Enga vrbs that mean both ‘to make/create’ and also ‘to fix’ (=to re-pair) is different from the other two and all three are totally different from the Witu verb root lati . This highlights the fact that it is the relationship between these two great metalinguistic events, creation and the re-pair of the broken relationship, that is the focus of attention. The form of the verb signifying the relationship is of no importance.
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The following are terms with these two meanings from other TNG languages. mim te create fix Ku Waru 370 talaluaamin create fix/heal Tifal Sandaun Province (Al Boush (personal communication) vyómu make fix Yele Rossel Island Milne Bay Province
Zenith Iconic Schema: the final solution to the problem of death
The way the broken relationship between the disobedient Witu and their creator, Akolali , was re-paired is encoded by the five special terms of the Witu Zenith Iconic Schema. It is encoded by five terms all of which have the same irregularity. Each term has two forms whose meaning is the same. No other terms in the language have this irregularity. But since it is shared by five terms it is not a random irregularity that has not real meaning. It is a systematic irregularity. The five terms tell a metalinguistic story. The order in which they must be decoded to discover the story line is determined by the meaning and the pair of forms that each term takes. They are the following terms Figure 5 The Witu Zenith Iconic Schema 1] mate mata to plant 2] takuta taguta cardinal 2 derived from the term matai ‘zenith’ ηηη takuta → takuta → ta kuta 3] padago → panago a certain man 4]] lata late to recover ones life force n ηηη ηηη derived from the term latai life force pa de a ko → pana ko -lawe -loe person as example of his group This Iconic schema will be dealt with in a great deal more detail in a section devoted to it later. The following is a brief summary of it. The allomorphs mate and mata of the Witu verb root ‘to plant’ The pair of forms of the verb root ‘to plant’, mate and mata , are both derived from the Witu term for the ‘zenith’, the term matai . This is the highest point in the sky. This is the symbolic residence of Akolali . We know this because his name is the product of the following submorphemic constituents. They encode him as ‘the male being who is up higher than all’. This places him at the highest place in the universe, the matai ‘zenith’. (The SMC < l> is a ligative (bonding) form.) Akolali < A ko l ali > The Creator-Planter
18 to produce one phoneme encodes the pro-creation of a child by two parents. It encodes life. The form mata of the Witu verb root meaning ‘to plant’ is derived from the term for the ‘zenith’, matai , by the loss of the last phoneme i. This encodes death, the loss of life. The pair of forms mate and mata , then, of the Witu verb root meaning ‘to plant’ encodes both life and death. Akolali governs both life and death. When he fixed the double helix po ‘twine’ or spirit life to every Witu at birth, he determined at that moment just when that person would die. Until then he kept the twine of spirit life of every Witu securely in his hands. When it was time for them to die he snapped the thread of life. This thread of life hung vertically from the matai ‘zenith’ to the matai ‘crown of the head’ of every Witu. It was so real to the Witus that parents used to tell their children never to move quickly under anything lest they snap the taut twine and die prematurely. Because the Witu disobeyed the call to come for the gift of their articulate language until called four times, they were all doomed to die according to their short but very powerful myth of the origin of language and death. It is so powerful than it has taken Harland Kerr at least 100 pages to decode all the information encoded into it. The allomorphs takuta and taguta of the Witu term ‘cardinal 2’ Because of the disobedience of the Witu Akolali had to send a second single seed into the world to be the permanent solution to the problem of death. The allomorph of ‘ cardinal 2 ’, takuta , is the primary allomorph from which the secondary allomorph taguta is derived. The primary allomorph reflects the binary organisation of the language and culture in general in the following way. In the first place it is one of a pair of allomorphs. In the second place it is the product of the following pair of SMCs. takuta
19 the ‘dual number’ term -ta that functions as a suffix with free personal pronouns and as a clitic with other terms and the Wiru ‘limited coordination’ clitic -ta that coordinates two, and only two entities, prototypically persons, in a relationship that is always conjunctive. The binary SMC structure of the primary allomorph of ‘ cardinal 2 ’, takuta , encodes the function of this number as the point of origin of the grammaticalisation of number. In other words, it encodes the point of origin of the symbiotic relationship between lexicon and grammar. The binary SMC structure of the allomorph takuta of ‘cardinal 2 ’, both of whose SMCs encode duality, identifies it as the primary allomorph. This is attested by the fact that its first SMC < taku > is related in the subliminally coded metalanguage of the region to the Fasu term taku that means ‘(one) side’ ‘(one) half (as opposed to the other, i.e. second half) ‘(one) part ; and ‘other (part)’ (May and Loeweke Fasu Dictionary 1981:235). The biological father and homeland of the second seed The second allomorph of ‘cardinal 2 ’, taguta , articulated phonetically as [ta ηηηgura ], is also the secondary allomorph. It is derived from the primary allomorph by the addition of a feature of nasalisation to the vowel of the medial syllable < ku > of the primary allomorph takuta . This transforms the primary allomorph into an allomorph with the following basic SMC structure. taguta
20 which both enter. When a person refers to his own or to another person’s biological father or homeland, one of only three prefixes in the language is preposed to the root ta signifying both, as illustrated below. oneketai
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The third pair of terms padago and panago: a certain man, the man of light doomed to die The first term of the Witu Zenith Iconic Schema has the following two forms written phonemically as padago and panago . They are pronounced ηηη ηηη ηηη phonetically as [ panda ko ] and [ pana ko ]. The sound represented as [ ] is a nasal sound like the last two letters ng of the English word sing . This pair of forms padago and panago both mean ‘a certain man’. It is also another way of encoding a second man, i.e., the person encoded by the forms of ‘cardinal 2’, takuta and taguta . The first form padago is actually the product of fusion of two separate Witu ηηη words pade and ago pronounced phonetically as [ pa nde ] and [ a ko ]. The second form of this third term panago , pronounced phonetically as ηηη [pana ko ] is derived from the first form written phonemically as padago ηηη and pronounced phonetically as [ panda ko ] by deleting its letter d. This encodes death, the loss of life. ηηη ηηη [pa nda ko ] → [pana ko ] ηηη The second form of this third term panago , pronounced as [ pana ko ] is a very unusual Witu word. It actually consists of two submorphemic parts. But it is difficult to determine how to break this form into two parts. The problem is solved f the nasal sound of its letter n, a nasal consonant, is shifted backwards to the preceding vowel. This turns this vowel into a nasalised vowel written as a whose underlining means that it is nasalised. As a result the second form panago of this third term becomes written phonemically as two submorphemic constituents < pa> that means ‘light’ and ago that means ‘male person’. The two SMCs, then, encode the subliminal (coded/hidden) metalanguage ‘man of light’. This means that the second special seed sent into the world by his biological father, Akolali , is the man of light. However, the first form of this term written phonemically as padago encodes the information that the man of light is going to lose his life. The fourth pair of terms: the two forms lata and late of the Witu verb root meaning ‘to recover one’s life force’ The fourth term of the Witu Zenith Iconic Schema has the following two forms lata and late that both mean ‘to recover one’s life force’. This pair of forms are both derived from the Witu term latai that signifies one’s life force.
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The first form lata is derived from the word latai by deleting its last phoneme, the vowel i. The deletion symbolises the loss of life. It encodes the loss of life of the man of life doomed to die. The second form late is derived from the world latai by the fusion of the last two letters ai into a single letter e. This symbolises the production of life, the return to life of the man of light who had died. The fifth pair of terms: the two forms of the ‘personal exemplary’ clitic -lawe and -loe The fifth pair of terms is different from the four other pairs of terms. It is a grammatical term, called a clitic. A clitic is a bit like a suffix added, for example, to a verb root like the ‘present tense’ suffix -k added to the verb root na ‘to eat’ in the Witu word naku ‘I am eating (something)’. A suffix is firmly attached to the root it is added to. A clitic is loosely added to words of more than one kind, like the Witu ‘universal activity’ clitic -le that can be added to nouns and verbs and space words etc, e.g. yapu-le ‘house building activity’ i-le ‘in this way’ and enekou-le ‘the activities that I saw’. The pair of forms -lawe and -loe are added to personal names. When it is added to a person’s name it means that that person is representative of his group as a whole. Because of that, the form -lawe is often added to a name to signify a group of people who are a special group who always operate together, e.g. Yetu-no oya-lawe (Jesus-owner friend-group) ‘the disciples of Jesus’. The pair of forms -lawe and -loe are part of the set of five special terms that have two different forms. They signify that the man of light who died and regained his life force did so as representative of his group, mankind (people). In other words it encodes the fact that the special second seed who was the man of light doomed to die, died and regained his life force as our Saviour. He died as our representative. He regained his life force as the final solution to the problem of death for disobedient people who were doomed to die because of their disobedience.
The skeptics will deny the recognition and the interpretation of this special set of terms and say that it is just the product of Harland Kerr’s imagination as a Bible Translator. The following is proof that it is not, and that the Witu people recognised it at once as part of their culture and metalanguage. The skeptics will say that the Witu people themselves should have been the ones to discover, analyse and interpret the Zenith Iconic Schema of five special terms. This is remarkably wrong. If that argument is true then the Witu people should have been able to write up their Grammar without any help from Harland Kerr and give it to him as soon as he and his wife,
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Marie, and littler daughter, Bronwyn, arrived among them in 1960 to help translate the New Testament into Witu. Not even the most hardened skeptic would be silly enough to say this. Before Harland and Marie Kerr arrived, the Witu did not evn know they had a Grammar or an Alphabet. However they had perfect subconscious knowledge of their Grammar in a way that an outside linguist never could have. But an outside person trained in Linguistics would have had to work with them to analyse their language and produce the written form of the Grammar they already knew. It is the same with the Metalanguage. The Witu know it. But they would never have been able to produce a written analysis of the Zenith Iconic Schema by themselves. However, once an outsider like Harland Kerr had discovered it they should recognise it at once without having to undertake an elaborate course of study. This is how Hartland Kerr found out that the Witu recognised the Witu Zenith Iconic Schema as soon as he presented it to them. First of all he chose to present it to two Witus, a married couple, Yalibu and Rebecca Punupo . Rebecca was a fluent speaker of English who had been the Postmistress of the Summer Institute of Linguistics Post Office at Ukarumpa for many years. Her husband, Yalibu , worked at the SIL Medical Clinic for many years. In 2001 Harland and Marie Kerr invited them both to have supper at their small home at Ukarumpa so that he could share with them his discovery of the Zenith Iconic Schema. As he told them what the five terms were with two different forms and explained the order in which they had to be ranked before their coded meaning could be discovered, neither Rebecca nor Yalibu had to ask Harland Kerr even once to repeat what he told them. They knew at once because it was their Zenith Iconic Schema. Rebecca finally began to cry and say, “To think that our Akolali God loved us Witu so much that he gave us this knowledge in our own language.’ Some time later Harland Kerr went out to Witu land with his wife when she was planning to do a helicopter survey of vernacular literacy classes in remote Witu villages. His wife, Marie, wanted him to fly in the helicopter with her and the two Witu men who were involved as supervisors of the literacy work. She wanted Harland Kerr to talk to the Witu people in these remote Witu villages about the Zenith Iconic Schema. But Harland was very reluctant to do so. He also felt that there would be no room for him. Finally, however, things happened in such a way that there was room for Harland to go. There was also room for Fr, Henry of the Capuchin Order of the Catholic Church who wanted to accompany them on the survey. They visited three remote villages and Harland told the story of the Zenith Iconic Schema to each of them. They all understood. At the last village Fr. Henry asked if he could participate and sing a hymn in Pidgin English
24 about Jesus saying he had been sent to open the eyes of the blind and the ears of the deaf. He held his arms out wide like the sign of the Cross as he sang. It was very moving. Then Harland began to speak to the audience of well over 100 Witu people, men, women and children, who crowded out the church building. He told them about the Zenith Iconic Schema words. As he told them about the two forms mate and mata of the verb root ‘to plant’ and the two forms takuta and taguta of ‘cardinal 2’, they all understood immediately what Harland was telling them. No one called out and asked him to repeat or explain anything again. Then before Harland Kerr could give them the two forms of the third term, they began to shout out all through the church: padago panago padago panago padago panago They were already anticipating what the third term was and its two different forms. Fr, Henry was witness to this. This is only part of what Akolali has encoded into these five special terms each with two forms. Harland Kerr will write it up in full in a special section. This is what the metalanguage of the Witu is all about. It is actually what the Witu language has retained since the Trans New Guinea Phylum of languages came into existence many thousands of years ago. It is like a jigsaw puzzle with many many thousands of pieces that all lock in systematically with each other like the loops of a Witu ka ‘string net bag’. Other languages of the Trans New Guinea phylum have retained parts of this jigsaw puzzle. Witu seems to have retained nearly all the parts. It is the responsibility of speakers of the Witu language to share this knowledge with all the other languages of the very large Trans New Guinea Phylum.