During my dissertation fieldwork in Papua New Guinea over thirty years ago, I discovered that a bunch of Austronesian languages in Morobe Province mark their relative clauses in a manner that is pretty rare from a typological point of view: they mark both the beginning and the end of the clauses. An English equivalent would [...]
One of the things I’ve discovered in puttering about lately in my Sprachbundesgarten of little-known languages in Papua New Guinea is that Otto Dempwolff, the granddaddy of historical and comparative Austronesian linguistics, did not recognize the possibility of labialized labial phonemes (/pʷ/, /bʷ/, /mʷ/), despite how common they are among Oceanic languages. Since Dempwolff was [...]
The December 2007 issue of Oceanic Linguistics (on Project Muse) contains a squib by Frank Lichtenberk about a typologically unusual interrogative word in Toqabaqita (wherein q = glottal stop), a language in the southeast Solomon Islands.
In that language, the Proto-Oceanic question word *sapa ‘what?, which?’ has two reflexes: the independent word taa (with one long [...]
From Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 224-225:
From the air, my first view of Wamena was a broad, grassy valley dotted with traditional Dani hamlets surrounded by incredibly neat and extensive sweet potato and vegetable gardens. [...]
From Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 186-187:
Father Pat is an Irishman for whom Gaelic is a first language. He is one of the new style of Roman Catholic missionaries and is a vital force in [...]
From Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 153-154 (NYT book review here):
Afektaman is a pretty little village overlooking the range which lies to the south of Telefomin. It is situated at the entrance to the [...]
From Throwim Way Leg: Tree-Kangaroos, Possums, and Penis Gourds—On the Track of Unknown Mammals in Wildest New Guinea, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998), pp. 96-97 (NYT book review here):
On our last evening in Yominbip we were working restlessly in our hut, packing and repacking the equipment, when Maria, Oblankep’s wife, paid an unexpected [...]
From English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long (Duke U. Press, 2007; Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 91; Supplement to American Speech, vol. 81), chap. 10:
At the end of the Pacific War, the U.S. Navy occupied the Ogasawara Islands and permitted only the families of Western descent to return, along [...]
When I was looking up stuff about Yap, Micronesia, for a recent post, I came across a very informative website, with both photographs courtesy of the Micronesian Seminar and the National Archives—and even video—about the bombing of Yap during the Pacific War, about which I heard many stories during my time there in 1974. I [...]
From English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long (Duke U. Press, 2007; Publication of the American Dialect Society, no. 91; Supplement to American Speech, vol. 81), pp. 3, 9-10:
IT IS A LITTLE KNOWN LINGUISTIC FACT that among a group of Western Pacific islands English is maintained as a community language of the indigenous [...]
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