Tetun resources

[Catharina Williams-van Klinken]

Dear Chris,

There are several grammars and dictionaries of Tetun.

Two co-authors and I have written the following descriptive grammar of Tetun
Dili (i.e. Tetun as spoken in the capital city), which will hopefully be
printed soon:
Williams-van Klinken, Catharina, John Hajek, and Rachel Nordlinger. In
press. A grammar of Tetun Dili. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, 520.
In the spoken recorded texts for which I did counts, even for people who
cannot speak Portuguese, about 25% of the word tokens are Portuguese. In the
press, this count can go up markedly, to well over 50% - which is a major
reason why even educated Timorese people often cannot understand the Tetun
press well unless they can also speak Portuguese.

There are also the following, prescriptive, grammar and dictionary of Tetun
Dili. They give greater weight to the type of Tetun used in liturgical and
some other formal situations (characterised by mixing in a lot of Tetun
Terik). Being prescriptive, the dictionary includes many Portuguese and
Tetun Terik words which are not currently known in Dili except by speakers
of Portuguese and Tetun Terik.
Hull, Geoffrey, and Lance Eccles. 2001. Tetum Reference Grammar. Winston
Hills: Sebastiao  Aparício da Silva Project, Dili: Instituto Nacional de
Linguística, Universidade  Nacional de Timor Lorosa'e.
Hull, Geoffrey. 1999. Standard Tetum-English dictionary. Sydney: Allen &
Unwin in association with the University of Western Sydney Macarthur.

Earlier I wrote a grammar of the Fehan dialect of Tetun Terik. Tetun Terik
is the "original" rural variety of Tetun, which has very little borrowing.
The Fehan dialect is spoken in West Timor, so that such borrowing as does
occur is from Indonesian. However very similar dialects are spoken in East
Timor, where borrowing is from Portuguese.
van Klinken, Catharina. 1999. A grammar of the Fehan dialect of Tetun, an
Austronesian language of West Timor. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, C-155.

There are a number of other Tetun dictionaries, into Portuguese, English and
Dutch. However none of the dictionaries to date stand out as good. Lonely
Planet have put out a short "East Timor Phrasebook", written by John Hajek
and Alexandre Tilman.

Regards,
Catharina Williams-van Klinken



----- Original Message -----
From: <Vanish8080 at aol.com>
To: " AUSTRONESIAN LANGUAGES AND LINGUISTICS" <AN-LANG at anu.edu.au>
Sent: Monday, May 20, 2002 4:08 PM
Subject: Tetum


> Hello,
>
> For some reason ;-), I've become curious about Tetum. I can't seem to find
a
> grammatical description of it on the net. Would any of you know? And just
how
> much Portuguese is in it?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --Chris Sundita
>
> http://members.aol.com/vanish8080/rplanguages.html
> http://home.san.rr.com/bikol/
>
>