The ‘language of Tobi’ as presented in Horace Holden’s Narrative
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Anthony P. Grant
Abstract
In 1836 the American sailor and trader Horace Holden published an account of two years’ captivity on the island of Tobi, western Carolines, to which he appended a short vocabulary and numerous sentences in ‘the language of Tobi’. Examination of this material shows that most of the identifiable items in the vocabulary can be traced to Tobian, a Western Chuukic language, which is part of the Nuclear Micronesian subgroup within Austronesian, and for which we have a reasonable amount of modern data. However, the structural and especially syntactic features of the sentences appended in the five ‘dialogues’ consistently show few if any of the morphological features of modern Tobian. This chapter discusses the status of Holden’s material as a probable pidgin with a lexicon showing some admixture from Malay, Palauan and maybe Spanish.
Abstract
In 1836 the American sailor and trader Horace Holden published an account of two years’ captivity on the island of Tobi, western Carolines, to which he appended a short vocabulary and numerous sentences in ‘the language of Tobi’. Examination of this material shows that most of the identifiable items in the vocabulary can be traced to Tobian, a Western Chuukic language, which is part of the Nuclear Micronesian subgroup within Austronesian, and for which we have a reasonable amount of modern data. However, the structural and especially syntactic features of the sentences appended in the five ‘dialogues’ consistently show few if any of the morphological features of modern Tobian. This chapter discusses the status of Holden’s material as a probable pidgin with a lexicon showing some admixture from Malay, Palauan and maybe Spanish.
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Ethnohistory of speaking 7
- The ‘language of Tobi’ as presented in Horace Holden’s Narrative 41
- Language variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic 57
- How non-Indo-European is Fanakalo pidgin? 85
- Language change in a multiple contact setting 101
- Pidgin verbs 141
- Area index 171
- Language index 173
- Subject index 175
Chapters in this book
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Ethnohistory of speaking 7
- The ‘language of Tobi’ as presented in Horace Holden’s Narrative 41
- Language variation in Gulf Pidgin Arabic 57
- How non-Indo-European is Fanakalo pidgin? 85
- Language change in a multiple contact setting 101
- Pidgin verbs 141
- Area index 171
- Language index 173
- Subject index 175
