More on early vocabularies

[Ross Clark]

To follow up on my recent query and posting of three New Guinea area
vocabularies from Jacob Le Maire (1616).

Malcolm Ross replied off-line and was able to show that the first list
("Coast of New Guinea") can be identified as Sursuruga (New Ireland),
and the second ("Island of Moyses") as Tabar. The third, putatively
Sobei from the apparent location, does not fit so well and requires
further investigation.

Meanwhile, in a public lecture not long ago, I made so bold as to say
that the Le Maire vocabularies were the first recorded words of any
Polynesian language -- indeed, of any Pacific Island language. I have
since had two reservations about this.

1) Could there be earlier vocabularies in Spanish sources from western
Micronesia? 

2) In his recent paper in JPS ("Explaining the aberrant Austronesian
languages of Southeast Melanesia: 150 years of debate, JPS 115(3),
September 2006), Andy Pawley referred to vocabularies from Sikaiana and
from Espiritu Santo (Vanuatu) collected by Quiros in 1606. I didn't
remember seeing such lists, and Andy didn't have a reference handy, so I
checked back to Ray's _Melanesian Island Languages_ (1926). In his
chapter on "The Early Records", Ray says that Quiros, in a memorial to
the King of Spain, stated that he had collected such vocabularies, but
(Ray says)they are now apparently lost. In the text of the memorial
there are a few "Chicayana" words and one Espiritu Santo word. 

So perhaps I should have said that Le Maire's are the first extant
word-lists from any...etc. But of course this was Ray writing in the
1920s. It's not beyond imagining that these lists might have turned up
somewhere since then. Has anyone heard of them?

Ross Clark

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