A Comparative Study of the Melanesian Island Languages |
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Common terms and phrases
adjective adverbs Aneityum angate angeic appears Arosi Blagden brother Bugotu bulu Codrington dialects DIPHTHONGS Dual I incl Efate Eromanga excl father Fiji final consonant Florida follows the noun genitive göi grammar hear Hebrides hnei hnyi indefinite indicated INTERROGATIVE Islands kamu Kwamera Lakon Lifu lima Loyalty Islands Maewo manuk mata Melanesian MN languages möt Mota Mwala Nengone ngöne Nguna nikin nöjei numerals nyipunie ōvun person singular Plur plural Polynesian possessive prefix preposition pronoun retained root Roviana Sa'a San Cristoval Short forms short pronouns shown Sing sound suffix suffixed pronouns Tangoa tanis Tanna Tasiko tavat tense thee things thou tolu transitive Ulawa ûnyi verb vocabulary vowel WB's word-base words zira
Popular passages
Page 99 - And Barak said unto her, If thou wilt go with me, then I will go: but if thou wilt not go with me, then I will not go.
Page 19 - The words therefore of the language of the South Sea isles, which are similar to others in the Malay tongue, prove clearly in my opinion, that the Eastern South Sea isles were originally peopled from the Indian, or Asiatic Northern isles; and that those lying more to the Westward, received their first inhabitants from the neighbourhood of New Guinea.
Page 595 - EN [Indonesian] words form only a small portion of the word-store of any single language. The very large number of words which cannot be referred to an IN source cannot be shown to have (except to a very slight extent) any community of origin. (Ibid., 597-98.) It is important to observe that IN words which have representatives in Melanesia are more numerous in certain regions than in others. Thus the languages of the Shepherd Group (Nguna), Central New Hebrides, Fiji, the Banks...
Page 593 - The great variation in the extent to which the Melanesian islanders have changed IN words seems to suggest that these words were introduced by colonists from Indonesia, who effected a settlement on the smaller islands, imposing part of their speech upon the natives, and that this...
Page 16 - Mallicollo; and several circumstances concurred to make us think they were of another nation. They named the numerals as far as five or six in the language of Anamocka, and understood us when we asked the names of the adjacent lands in that language. Some, indeed, had black short frizzled hair like the natives of Mallicollo, but others had it long, tied up on the crown of the head, and ornamented with feathers like the New Zealanders. Their other ornaments were bracelets and necklaces; one man had...
Page 19 - JR Forster, Observations made during a Voyage round the World (London, 1778), 397; G.
Page 431 - A division" is karoa, but karo-a, is "divide it." 1 1 . Independent Forms of Nouns. In some of the Island languages nouns " which signify parts of a whole, members of a body, and such like ; things which can stand in a certain relation to some inclusive whole3...
Page 75 - A comparison of some of the dialects of Western Polynesia,
Page 595 - IN tongue, and are on a par with the modern pidgin of the Pacific where the so-called English has such words as 'savvy,' 'pickaninny,
Page 285 - ... verbs in the present indicative appeler (to call) Singular Plural j'appelle nous appelons tu appelles vous appelez il, elle, on appelle ils, elles appellent Rules and observations: 1. An Orthographically changing verb is a verb that changes in spelling. 2. In the preceding box, appeler doubles the 1 in the three persons of the singular and in the third person plural.