37.1611, Reviews: Half Silver, Half Gold: Maria Zielenbach (2026)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-37-1611. Wed Apr 29 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.1611, Reviews: Half Silver, Half Gold: Maria Zielenbach (2026)

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Date: 29-Apr-2026
From: Clemens Mayer [cjmayer at hawaii.edu]
Subject: Typology: Maria Zielenbach (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-129

Title: Half Silver, Half Gold
Subtitle: Modole folk stories and a first sketch grammar
Series Title: Open Text Collections
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/542

Author(s): Maria Zielenbach

Reviewer: Clemens Mayer

SUMMARY
Half Silver, Half Gold presents ten Modole (mqo) stories documented by
Dutch missionary G. J. Ellen, and a grammar sketch based on this data.
The book consists of three sections, an introductory section, a
grammar sketch, and the ten texts.
The first part, Preliminaries  (p. 1-23), gives an overview of the
language background and context, as well as contextualizing the Modole
people themselves. The language is a Papuan family that belongs to the
North Halmahera family, and is spoken on the northern peninsula of
Halmahera island. There are approximately 2,000 Modole people today, a
number that is said to have been relatively stable for at least the
last century. However, daily use of Modole is decreasing, with
language shift towards Malay taking place.
Chapter 3 (p. 14-18) gives a background on the missionary that
originally documented the tales presented in this book: Gerrit Jan
Ellen (1876-1957). Relatively few details about his background are
known, but he served as a missionary in Halmahera between 1903 and
1938. While he did interact with the Modole, he did not live in their
territory, nor were they the focus of his evangelical work. This
explains the relatively small dataset he collected for the language,
consisting of the aforementioned text and a wordlist of about 1,000
entries. A few additional wordlists were collected by others
throughout the 20th century as well.
Chapter 4 (p. 19-23) discusses the provenance of the texts and gives
an overview. It is unknown who the original speakers were that told
the stories and/or worked with G. J. Ellen on the wordlist. The author
gives an overview of some of the similarities and differences between
the texts, and hypothesizes that this may be due to inter-speaker
differences or different language varieties. The editing and
publishing background of the text is likewise obscure, and it is
therefore unknown who translated the texts. The author also covers the
methodologies for analysis and editing of the book in this section.
The total number of tokens in the dataset is 6,239.
Part Two, Sketch grammar (p. 25-88), consists of a single chapter with
seventeen sections. The grammar sketch covers an extensive number of
topics, starting with orthography and parts of speech, and ending in
complex clauses. Sections 5.1 to 5.3 (p. 27-32) give preliminary
information on orthography, parts of speech, and other generalities.
Section 5.4 (pp. 33-40) discusses the pronouns and indices. Sections
5.5 (p. 40-44) and 5.6 (pp. 44-46) discuss the elements preceding
verbs and nouns, respectively. Sections 5.7 (pp. 46-54) and 5.8 (pp.
52-61) discuss the directional and locational suffixes, and the other
suffixes, respectively. Section 5.9 (p. 61-65) covers numerals, and
Sections 5.10 (pp. 65-71) and 5.11 (pp. 71-74) cover demonstratives
and possession, respectively. The next five sections describe a number
of clause types and clausal operations: Section 5.12 (pp. 74-75)
describes the verbless clause, Section 5.13 (pp. 76-81) the simple
verbal clause, Section 5.14 (pp. 81-82) gives a brief overview of
complex clauses, Section 5.15 (pp. 82-83) describes negation, and
Section 5.16 (pp. 83-86) discusses question formation. The last
section, Section 5.17 (pp. 86-88), shows some remaining elements,
including coordination and subordination, modality, focus, and
emphasis.
The third and final part (pp. 89-289) consists of the ten stories that
form the dataset used for the grammar sketch, and is the bulk of the
book itself. Each text is laid out in the following structure: an
introduction and summary, followed by an English translation, the
Modole text, and then G. J. Ellen’s Dutch translation, followed by the
interlinearized glossed text. The interlinear texts each contain
numerous footnotes, showing both G. J. Ellen’s notes, as well as
grammatical and semantic considerations by the author.
EVALUATION
This book provides a valuable contribution to the study of North
Halmahera languages, which, though having a long history of
description and publications starting in the 19th century (e.g., Van
Baarda 1891), are relatively understudied. The book forms the first
language-focused publication on Modole since the original publication
of the stories in Dutch over a century earlier (Ellen 1916), and is
the first grammatical description of the language.
The author provides ample context about G. J. Ellen and his
relationship to the Modole people, as well as the stories themselves.
They also provide some context on the current status and use of Modole
and the stories, but was not able to make any first-hand observations.
The context about the current status and use of Modole is somewhat
minimal, but this also stems from the intent of the book.
The grammar sketch, for being based on just over 6,000 tokens, is
relatively extensive. To the credit of the author, they were able to
extract several detailed analyses by minute inspection of the dataset.
In other instances, where data is lacking or unclear, the author often
makes sure to hedge their analyses accordingly. Nonetheless, there
were several instances where the analysis did not feel robust, but
were presented as such. For example, the pronominal index wi is stated
to be used for 3SG.M.U, 3SG.M>3SG.F, 3SG.M>3SG.M, and 3SG.M>1PL.EX.
While it is unclear whether the author analyzes this as a single
polysemous or a number of homophonous forms, the analysis of this
form/these forms as having multiple functions is solely reliant on
concluded obligatory actor/undergoer marking. However, these less
robust analyses overall do not greatly impede on the exceptional
quality of the overall grammar sketch.
The author refrains from using data from other North Halmahera
languages, or other Modole language sources, to support their analyses
for Modole, as well as minimizing discussions of diachrony in order to
‘faithfully reflect the language of only the texts’ (p. 27), though
they are supported in some instances by a Modole speaker for
clarifications. Additionally, the author notes that they will have
been influenced by descriptive works on closely related languages,
especially the Pagu grammar (Perangin Angin 2018). This is
understandable and commendable, keeping in line with the purposes of
this book, but additional (typological) contextualization may have
been able to further bolster some of the analytical argumentation.
Additionally, the author does in fact refer to numerous publications
on the language family such as Holton (2008, 2017),  Voorhoeve (1988),
and Wada (1980), as well as language specific works on related or
geographically close languages throughout the grammatical description.
While I find these to be relevant and supportive additions, they run
somewhat counter to the mission statement given in the grammar
sketch’s introduction. This point notwithstanding, the author is in
most cases careful to note and reference specific definitions of
descriptive terminology.
The grammar sketch covers a variety of topics wider than would
normally be expected for an analysis based on a limited, second-hand
dataset. This speaks again to the ability of the author to distill
relatively fine-grained distinctions and patterns within the data.
That being said, some areas are still missing or underrepresented.
Some of these are expected based on the datasets (e.g., phonetics and
phonology), while others are less so. For example, there is scarcely
any discussion about Tense-Aspect-Mood-Evidentiality (TAME), with the
exception of the potential modal marker tanu (p. 87). While the author
notes that tense is unmarked (p. 27; NB: there are still suffixes
operating in the temporal domain), it remains somewhat unclear whether
TAME is grammatically unmarked, not analytically perceivable from the
data, left out of the analysis, or a combination of these three.
The collection of texts itself is of impeccable quality: The structure
of providing a summary, Modole, English, Dutch, and
interlinearized-glossed versions of the text, and the inclusion of
copious footnotes make for an overseeable and detailed set of curated
stories. The footnotes themselves show G. J. Ellen’s notes, as well as
many semantic and grammatical considerations given by the author. The
glosses and footnotes clearly mark uncertainties and deviations from
the original Dutch translations, providing ample argumentation for
each. Notable, however, is that the author here uses many comparisons
to (potential) cognates in other North Halmahera languages, or
suggests potential loanwords. While this is perfectly acceptable, it
somewhat contradicts the statements made in the introduction to the
grammar sketch, where it is claimed that as few outside sources as
possible were used. The assumption can be made that outside sources
were used for lexeme identification, but it leaves the reader
wondering where that line was drawn in the grammatical analysis.
Overall, this book provides two important resources for the study of
North Halmahera languages, and language documentation in general: the
grammar sketch shows that relatively robust analyses can be performed
on a limited dataset without the need of excessive elicitation, and
the collection of stories, besides providing the language data
themselves, forms an
excellent example of curation and presentation of textual data. I
would recommend every researcher who plans to publish similar datasets
to use this book as a template.
REFERENCES
Baarda, M. J. van. 1891. Beknopte Spraakkunst van de Galillareesche
taal. Utrecht: Kemink & Zoon. 109pp.
Ellen, G. J. 1916. Verhalen en fabelen in het Modole met vertalingen.
Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-Indië
72. 197-232.
Holton, Gary. 2008. The rise and fall of semantic alignment in North
Halmahera, Indonesia. In Mark Donohue and Søren Wichmann (eds.), The
Typology of Semantic Alignment, 252-276. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Holton, Gary. 2017. A unified system of spatial orientation in the
Austronesian and non-Austronesian languages of Halmahera. NUSA 62.
157–189.
Perangin Angin, Dalan Mehuli. 2018. A descriptive grammar of the Pagu
language. PhD Diss., The University of Hong Kong.
Voorhoeve, C. L. 1988. The languages of the North Halmaheran stock.
Papers in New Guinea linguistics 26. 181–209.
Wada, Yuichi. 1980. Correspondence of consonants in North Halmahera
languages and the conservation of archaic sounds in Galela. Senri
Ethnological Studies 7. 497–529.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Clemens J. Mayer has earned his PhD in Linguistics from the University
of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. His research focuses on the Western Chuukic
branch of Micronesian languages, and incorporates community-led
research, biocultural relations, linguistic variation, and descriptive
linguistics.



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