early vocabularies (was [An-lang] Re: An-lang Digest, Vol 45, Issue 5 )

[Roger Mills]

My reply inadvertently went to Mr. Parker only; here it is for the rest of 
you :-))-- somewhat superseded by Waruno Mahdi's comments; 18th C. "long s" 
had slipped my mind. I too suspected that some of the strange vowels 
represented schwa.
=======================================================

> Richard Parker wrote:
>
> >   I recently found a wordlist of Savu, compiled by Sydney Parkinson, 
> > Capt Cook's naturalist's draughtsman, in 1773, and compared it with the 
> > modern Savu list compiled by Robert Blust.
> >
> >   Their were several regular S>H changes:
> >   soofoo (breast) huhu
> >   sivànga (nose) huwaŋa
> >   sillaèo (to see) héléo
> >   lasilai (sand) laha lae
>
> The shift of s > h (initially?) over 200 years isn't surprising. "soofoo" 
> quite likely = [suhu], showing that s already > h medially. What exactly 
> does
> -ng- represent? [N] or [Ng] or maybe something else? The old vs. modern 
> forms to my view simply reflect phone(mt)ic change, not vocab. 
> replacement.
> >
> >   some V>W
> >   vooe (fruit) wue
> >   raee, vorai (earth/soil) rai[wawa]
> >   vàva (below) wawa
>
> If Savu /w/ is/was a bilabial fricative [B] or perhaps a labio-dental 
> approximant (IPA lower case upsilon)--like Ml. and others /w/-- an 
> Englishman's confusion with "v" is understandable.
>
> There is always a problem with wordlists collected by amateurs-- how good, 
> actually, was their ear? what sort of transcription system (if any!) were 
> they using? how much contact did they have-- or was their list the result 
> of a few days in port? did they in fact have hold of a native speaker, or 
> just some guy of undetermined origin but fluent in Malay who said, Oh yes, 
> I know bahasa Savu....  etc. etc.  Not to deny the value of the early 
> documents, of course.
>
> Over the last several years I've worked with two Kisar lists-- Earl 1848 
> and Rinnooy 1886; Earl was apparently just visiting, Rinnooy was a 
> missionary who clearly had pretty good command of the language (but read 
> Brandes' introductory notes to the list!!). Their lists match about 80%, 
> Earl has some oddities that one can attribute to his English-based 
> transcription (maybe another 15% or maybe a different dialect); perhaps 5% 
> do not match at all. NEITHER ONE is at all clear on the existence of 
> glottal stop in the language; some of Earl's forms suggest it (either 
> with -h- or an apostrophe, not always etymologically expected); but it's 
> completely lacking in Rinnooy. Yet the Christensen's 1992 paper with minor 
> exceptions has /?/ exactly where it ought to be etymologically.  What's 
> going on???
> >
> >   and some other word changes that I'm not so sure about, like:
> > teaco (to walk) ta-kako
> > racäee (skin) kuri
>
> "teaco" 'walk' looks misheard, IMO; "skin" is certainly odd; kuri is 
> certainly what one would expect.
> >
> >   Both Savu wordlists are on the AVBD database at:
> >   http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian
> >
> Interesting....I'll have to take a look at those.
>
> BTW, I don't know if I ever posted this ref-- a wordlist of 
> Dawan/Timorese/Atoni compiled by one of my Indonesian students back in the 
> 70s-- http://cinduworld.tripod.com/timorlist.htm  --with a lot of added 
> material from Middelkoop and Jonker.
>
> The word for "sand" incidentally:
> snaèn -- sand

also cited in Jonker's Rotinese Dict. s.v. Rot. solokaek, Kup slaen, Savu 
(la)halae, Bima
> sarae 

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