Parrot Time - Issue 5 - September / October 2013

Parrot TimeThe Thinking of Speaking Issue #5 September / October 201 3

OOttttoo DDeemmppwwooll ffff aannddtthhee IIssll aannddss ooffLLaanngguuaaggee

LLeeggeennddss ooff MMaauu ii

LLaanngguuaaggeess IInn PPeerrii llRRaappaa NNuu ii ,,CChhaammoorrrroo,, RRoottuummaann

PPaassii ffii kkaa FFeessttiivvaall

MMaallaayy MMaasstteerrss

SpecialMalayo-PolynesianIssue

TThhee SSttrraannggeeRRoonnggoorroonnggoo

TThhee AAvvooiiuu ll iiWWrrii ttii nngg SSyysstteemm

LLooookk bbeeyyoonnddwwhhaatt yyoouu kknnooww

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Contents

Parrot Time | Issue #5 | September / October 2013 3

1 6 At the Cinema - Whale Rider

1 2 Otto Dempwolff - Islands of LanguageDoctor, soldier, linguist and anthropologist. Otto Dempwolff wasall of these during his work with the people and languages ofAustronesia.

26 Languages in Peril - The Island Invasion

34 Word on the Streets - Malay Masters

38 Where Are You?

31 Revisited - Legends of Maui - Maui's HomeMaui is a demi god who is a major figure in the mythology ofthe Pacific nations. This article talks about his origins and hishome.

Parrot TimeParrot Time is a magazine

covering language, linguisticsand culture of the world around

us.

It is published by ScriveremoPublishing, a division of

Parleremo, the language learningcommunity.

Join Parleremo today. Learn alanguage, make friends, have fun.

22 AvoiuliCultures and languages influence each other, but how oftendoes a cultural practice become a form of writing a language?On the island nation of Vanuatu, this has happened in the formof Avoiuli.

Departments

Features

05 Letter From The Editor

Editor: Erik ZidoweckiEmail: [email protected]

Published by Scriveremo Publish-ing, a division of Parleremo.This issue is available online fromhttp://www.parrottime.com

The editor reserves the right toedit all material submitted. Viewsexpressed in Parrot Time are notnecessarily the official views ofParleremo. All rights of reproduc-tion, translation and adaptation re-served for all countries, exceptwhere noted otherwise. All copy-right material posted in the public-ation retains all its rights from theoriginal owner. Parrot Time, Par-leremo, officers and administra-tion accept no responsibilitycollectively or individually for theservice of agencies or persons ad-vertised or announced in thepages of this publication.

Cover: The Cantabugon beachin the small town ofAloguinsan in the province ofCebu, Philippines.

1 8 Celebrations - Pasifika Festival

40 Revisited - Maui Snaring the SunMaui is a demi god who is a major figure in the mythology ofthe Pacific nations. This article talks about one of his greatfeats: his capturing of the sun.

6 Rongorongo - Island ChantsRongorongo is a strange writing system used in numerous textson Easter Island which even the natives have forgotten how toread.

Bolehkah anda bercakap bahasa Malaysia?

PPaarrlleerreemmoo

LLeeaarrnnaallaanngguuaaggee,,MMaakkeeffrriieennddss,,HHaavveeffuunn!!

wwwwww..ppaarrll eerreemmoo..oorrgg

Letter From The Editor


WWelcome to our Malayo-Polynesian special issue! Many of you areprobably wondering why we are doing this issue which focusesmainly on the languages of this branch of the Austronesianlanguages. More of you are probably wondering what the languages ofthis branch are and what region they are from. You wouldn’t be alonein wondering that.

When you talk about language families, most language learners willknow what you mean when you talk about the Romance languages,or the Slavic and Germanic languages. If you mention Asianlanguages, they will probably think instantly of Japanese, Chinese,and Korean. If you mention Celtic languages, they will surely be ableto at least name Irish and Scottish as part of those.

But what are the Malayo-Polynesian languages? These are the onesthat are used on a large number of islands and nation states in thePacific, in the triangle formed by Asia, Australia, and the west coastof the United States. Some of the more popular locations of this areaare easily recognizable, once you mention them. Many of them are theisland paradises everyone talks about “getting away” to: Hawaii,Tahiti, Fiji, Bali. Others are ones that are mentioned, but you neverreally know where they are, like Madagascar and Indonesia. They arejust “out there” somewhere.

The languages themselves number over a thousand. Some you might have heard of, such as the onesthat go with those more common places: Hawaiian, Tahitian, Fijian, Balinese, Malagasy and Indonesian.You might also have heard of Tagalog (also known as Filipino), Javanese, Maori, Samoan, Tongan andMalay. But what do you know about them? Have you ever seen them written or heard them spoken?

The languages of this branch are rarely mentioned or even thought about, for there are so many in sucha relatively small area of the world. Papa New Guinea alone has a few dozen of these languages on itsisland. With this special issue, we are hoping to get some people more interested in these language andthe cultures surrounding them. Many of the languages and cultures are declining as they compete withthe more dominant cultures of the area while others are thriving with the tourism of thousands of peoplevisiting them every year. We are also working to add resources for a few of these languages to the site,Parleremo, and we welcome anything you might wish to contribute.

Why Polynesian?

Erik ZidoweckiERIK ZIDOWECKIEDITOR IN CHIEF

EEaasstteerr IIssllaanndd iisskknnoowwnn mmaaiinnllyyffoorr iitt'' ss hhuuggeeMMooaaii ssttaattuueess ..FFeeww kknnooww tthhaatt iissaallssoo hhoommee ttoo aann aassyyeett uunnddeecciipphheerreeddssccrriipptt kknnoowwnn aassRRoonnggoorroonnggoo..

RRoonnggoorroonnggoo

IIssllaanndd CChhaannttss

Rongorongo - Island Chants


aster Island, located in thesoutheastern PacificOcean, has two ancient

mysteries related to it. The morefamous of these are the hugestatues, called Moai, which werecreated by the early Rapa Nuipeople and are located all overthe island.

The second mystery is re-lated to a writing system which,to this day, remains unde-ciphered. Rongorongo is a sys-tem of glyphs that were carvedinto wood. Just over two dozenwooden objects of varying shapeand size, containing these char-acters, have been collected andare kept in numerous museumsand private collections. Even thenatives of the island no longerretain the knowledge of what thewriting means.

The original description ofthe script, according to the nat-ives, was kohau motu mo ron-gorongo, meaning “lines incisedfor chanting out”. This gotshortened to kohau rongorongo(“lines [for] chanting out”) . Nowit is just normally referred to asRongorongo.

HistoryPolynesian people settled onEaster Island some time betweenfrom 300 to 1200 CE. The oraltraditions of the Rapa Nui peopleclaim that either Hotu Matu’a orTu’u ko Iho, the two legendaryfounders of Rapa Nui, broughtwith them 67 tablets from theirhomeland ofMarae Renga. Thissame founder is also said tohave brought many indigenousplants like the toromiro tree,sweet potato, sugarcane, andpaper mulberry.

Despite them creating astrong culture and thriving for along time, their isolation provedto be a major problem. As theybecame overpopulated, theyused up most of the islands lim-ited natural resources, includingthe already scarce trees. WhenEuropean explorers arrived on

the island in 1722, the popula-tion had gone from a thrivingcivilization of 15000 to one ofjust 3000. The Europeanscaused the population to declineeven further by exposing thenatives to diseases they brought.

Peruvians started raidingthe island for free labor in theforms of slaves in the 1860s.Over the the years, hundreds ofnatives were taken, with few ofthem surviving long in Peru.When the Bishop of Tahiti put astop to it, he had the survivingRapa Nui natives sent back, butan epidemic of smallpox killedmost of them on the ship. Thesurvivors carried the sicknesswith them, and the remaining is-land population was nearlywiped out. The language RapaNui also suffered, as it becamemixed with the widely spokenTahitian. (For more informationon the Rapa Nui language, see“Languages in Peril” in this is-sue) .

“Easter Island” got it’s namefrom the Dutch explorer JacobRoggeveen, who was the the is-land’s first recorded Europeanvisitor. He found it on EasterSunday, and so named itPaasch-Eyland, Dutch for “East-er Island”. The official name of

the island is Isla de Pascua,which also means “Easter Is-land”. The Polynesian name forit, Rapa Nui, means “Big Rapa”,which it got during the slaveraids, because of its topographicsimilarity to the island of Rapain the Bass Islands of the Aus-tral Islands group. Spanish ex-plorer Felipe González de Ahedolater traveled to the island in1770 and claimed it for Spain. In1888, Easter Island was an-nexed by Chile by PolicarpoToro, a Chilean naval officer,under the Tratado de Anexión dela isla (“Treaty of Annexation ofthe Island”) .

The Christian religion cameto the island when EugèneEyraud, a lay friar of the Con-grégation de Picpus, landed onEaster Island on January 2,1864, and began evangelizingthe natives. He kept a record ofhis stay in which he also told ofhis discovery of the tablets whenhe first arrived. However, he didnot mention the tablets again, sothey remained unnoticed. He leftnine months later, then returnedas a full priest in 1865. He dieda few years later of tuberculosis.

DiscoveryFlorentin-Étienne Jaussen, the

One of the authentic tablets containing Rongorongo writing


8 Parrot Time | Issue #5 | September / October 2013

Bishop of Tahiti, received astrange gift from the newly con-verted Catholics of Easter Islandin 1868. It was a small woodenboard with a long cord of humanhair wound around it. On theboard was a strange hieroglyphicwriting. Wanting to learn more,Jaussen wrote to Father Hip-polyte Roussel on Easter Island,instructing him to collect all thetablets and find some nativeswho were capable of translatingthem. Roussel could only recovera few of the tablets, and the nat-ives could not agree on how toread them.

From Eyraud’s records, theyknew he had seen hundreds oftablets on his arrival only a fewyears earlier, so they wonderedwhat had happened to all ofthem. Eyraud had also writtenthat the natives had little in-terest in them. The Bishop ques-tioned the island wise men,Ouroupano Hinapote andTekaki, and they explained thatwhile they knew how to carvethe characters with a smallshark’s tooth, according to theirteachings, there was nobody left

on the island who knew how toread the characters. The Peruvi-ans raids had caused the deathsof all the wise men who stillknew how, and so the engravedpieces of wood were no longer ofany interest to the natives. Theysimply burned them as firewoodor wound their fishing linesaround them. Some tablets wereused to start fires by rubbingsticks against them. Some wereeven used in the construction ofcanoes.

There were more attempts torecover tablets. Three more wereobtained by Captain Gana fromChile in 1870, and German eth-nologist Thomas Barthel foundthe decayed remains of half adozen more tablets in caves inthe 1950s.

CreationFrom the various interviews ofnatives, the possible source andreason for the tablets was un-covered. Along with carved tab-lets, the founders broughtaround six hundred texts, writ-ten on a paper made of bananaleaves. These texts were anarchive of the history of thepeople, but as the leaves startedto deteriorate, the archive wasthreatened. King Hotu Matuaordered the contents to becopied onto tablets made oftoromiro wood.

There was a particular groupthat was given this task. Theywere the tangata rongorongo,and were selected high officialsfrom each clan. They lived in

their own special dwellings andtheir sole job was to teach howto read and write the glyphs toothers. They would conduct les-sons under a banana tree, withtheir students seated aroundthem in a circle. Through

singing and reciting the storiesof the text, the students learnedwhat each character meant init’s entirety. Each text had aparticular melody, so readingthe text was very difficult if it’sparticular tune wasn’t known.

As they learned to read thetexts, the students would alsolearn to carve the characters in-to the branches of bananaleaves, using a small shark’stooth. When they had becomeproficient in that, they would beallowed to carve into toromirowood. Toromiro wood was slowgrowing and in limited supply,however, so other kinds of woodwere also used, including drift-wood that would wash up on theisland shore. Once a tablet hadbeen carved, it was placed into aenvelope made of reed leaves,then hung. After that, onlyteachers or their servants wereallowed to touch them.

These texts were anarchive of the history ofthe people, but as theleaves started to deteri-orate, the archive wasthreatened.

Copy made by Barthel of one of the tablets



TextEven though the natives nolonger knew how to translate thetexts, they did know how thevarious tablets were made. Theprocess of cutting grooves intowood is called fluting and thegrooves that are cut are calledflutes. Scribes used obsidianflakes (pieces of a particularhard rock) or small shark teethto flute the wood. Most of theglyphs are composed of twoparts which are then connectedby a fine cut. It is believed thatthe characters were created byfirst sketching the design usingthe obsidian, then a shark toothwould deepen the cuts. Thatwould mean the remaining finecuts may have been mistakes orsome part of the design. Some ofthe carved tablets seem to havebeen carved with a steel blade,which makes the authenticity ofthose tablets questionable, per-haps done by someone trying tomimic or falsify the tablets.

The glyphs are generally cat-egorized as being forms of hu-mans, animals, vegetables orgeometric shapes. Those glyphswith “heads” are usually ori-ented up or facing right. A feware inverted (head down or fa-cing left) , but the reason for thatis unknown. Some of the headshave markings on the side thatmight represent eyes or ears. Acommon glyph is a bird, withmany resembling frigatebirds,which happens to be normallyassociated with Makemake (thecreator of humanity, god of fer-

tility and main godof the Tangatamanu (birdmancult) ) .

The direction ofthe text is also ofinterest. Normally,text is written inthe same direction,vertically or hori-zontally. The textsof the Rongorongoscript is written in alternatingdirections, starting from thelower left corner. A line is readfrom left to right, but uponreaching the end, the tablet isthen turned upside down, andthe next line is then read. Thelines above and below the onebeing read would be upsidedown. This system is called re-verse boustrophedon. The scriptcontains no punctuation orparagraphs.

CataloguingPerhaps the person most in-volved in cataloguing and under-standing the Rongorongo tabletsin the last century was ThomasBarthel. He visited most of themuseums which had tablets and

made pencil rubbings of them.From this data, he compiled thefirst collection of the script, andhe published this as Grundlagenzur Entzifferung derOsterinsels-

chrift (Basics of Deciphering theEaster Island Writing) in 1958.He was also the first scholar tocorrectly identify anything in thetexts.

Barthel gave each script asingle capital letter and a name,like “Tablet G: the Little Tablet ofSantiago”. There is no realstandard in the names, withsome being descriptive whileothers refer to where they are.Other names include “CrescentTablet”, “Snuffbox”, “Oar”,“Crescent [piece of] Wood”,“Santiago Staff”, “Worm-eatenTablet” and “Great Tablet”. Thereare 26 such tablets that are be-lieved to be authentic, and notcreated later by others.

He also distinguished thetwo faces of a tablet with a suffixof r (recto - “front”) or v (verso -“back”) . This differs in a fewcases for objects that don’t haveexactly 2 sides, such as theSantiago Staff, which is a single

An example of how text written in reverseboustrophedon would appear.

direction

wil l need to be rotated upside

This is a l ine of text that wil l

bereadfromlefttorightthen

downandreadintheopposite

Closeup of the Rongorongo staff



round item, and the Snuff Box,which has six sides.

Each of the texts hasbetween 2 and 2320 glyphs, withsome of them compounded, for atotal over 15 thousand. Barthelassigned a numerical three-digitcode to each glyph or group ofsimilar glyphs which he believedto be allographs (variants of oth-er glyphs). This produced 600numeric codes. These codeswere not simply assigned as thenumbers one through six hun-dred. Each of the three digitsrepresented a certain aspect. Forexample, the hundreds place(leftmost digit) is a numeral from0 to 7, and refers to the head or,if there is no head, the overallform of the glyph: 0 and 1 forshapes and inanimate objects, 2for characters with ears, 3 and 4for those with open mouths withlegs or tails, 5 for other headsthat don’t fit the previousgroups, 6 for ones with beaks, 7for non-humans, like fish. Theother two digits have similarroles, referring to various com-mon patterns, like the positionsof arms or wings. While the as-signment of the numbers to dif-ferent aspects might not beperfect, it remains the only ef-fective system yet proposed tocatalogue the glyphs.

TranslatingA few people have made at-tempts at translating the script,but nothing conclusive has beenproven.

In Tahiti, Jaussen hadfound a laborer from Easter Is-land, Metoro, who claimed to be

able to read the tablets. Metorowould take a tablet, rotate it tofind it’s beginning, then startchanting what is written.Jaussen made charts of the

characters, grouping them bysimilarity and what he thoughtthey might mean. He based hismeanings on what Metoro toldhim each glyph meant. Metoroalso gave him a complete trans-lation of one of the tablets. Fromthis, he was able to produce atranslation for others, but theresults were so senseless that heeven wrote in an introduction toit that “One must resign, there isno sense in it”.

Later study of the transla-tions would provide a reason asto why Jaussen’s translationmade no sense. Jaussen hadcollected the items and the in-formation, but had never trulyanalyzed what he had. WhileMetoro had given him a transla-tion of a tablet, Jaussen had notcompared that with the mean-ings of the symbols. They did notmatch.

William J. Thomson was thepaymaster on the USS Mohican.He spent twelve days on EasterIsland in December,1886, andduring that time he found a mannamed Ure Va’e Iko who claimedto understand the texts. He hadbeen the steward of King

Nga’ara, the last king who wassaid to have had knowledge ofwriting. While Va’e Iko could nothimself write, he knew many ofthe chants. Thomson gave himmoney and gifts to get him toread photographs of Jaussen’stablets.

At first, Thomson believedVa’e Iko, but then he began tonotice that he would recite thesame translation for completelydifferent photographs. Va’e Ikowould also often turn the photo-graph before reading out thesame number of glyphs as onthe line. It is unclear as to whyVa’e Iko was misleading Thom-son, but part of the reason mayhave been that the scripts wereconsidered sacred and thus notto be shared with outsiders. Itwas apparent, though, that thiswas not going to produce a truetranslation.

Katherine Routledge, a Brit-ish archaeologist and anthropo-logist, conducted a scientificexpedition to Rapa Nui with herhusband in 1914. The intentwas to catalogue the art, cus-toms, and writings of the island.When they arrived, she inter-viewed two elderly natives, Kapi-era and Tomenika, who weresaid to have some knowledge of

There are a few barriersto providing an accuratetranslation, even ifRon-gorongo is a true writingsystem.

One of the tablets with Rongorongo on the left and a drawn copy by Barthel on the right

A banana tree, like those that the tangatarongorongo would sit under as they taughtothers how to create the Rongorongo texts



the tablets. However, their ex-planations often contradictedeach other.

Kapiera told Routledge thateach character had both a literalmeaning, like the object it rep-resented, and a sort of “remind-ing” meaning, referring tosomething in the mind of thereader. Those meanings wouldprobably have then been passeddown orally. That would be sim-ilar to someone tying a knot in astring to remind them ofsomething; the knot representswhat they should remember, butany other person would see itsimply as a knot. Routledge con-cluded that Rongorongo did notdirectly represent language, butrather was an idiosyncratic mne-monic device or proto-writing(systems that have many char-acteristics similar to writing) .She figured that the meanings ofthe characters were redefined byeach scribe of a text, so that thetext could only then be read bysomeone with specific knowledgeof that text.

There are a few barriers toproviding an accurate transla-tion, even if Rongorongo is a truewriting system. There are so fewremaining texts that making anyvalid pattern matching im-possible. There are no illustra-tions or other means to guessthe context of the text. If Ron-gorongo was related to the old

Rapa Nui language, that hassince become so mixed withTahitian that it would likely notmatch the written text anymore.

Many other translation at-tempts have been made, mostbeing largely unlikely. Australianpediatrician Alan Carroll pub-lished a translation in 1892 thatwas based on an idea of thetexts being written by an extinct“Long-Ear” population of EasterIsland and represent some mix-ture of Quechua and other lan-guages of Peru andMesoamerica. However, he didnot publish any methods of ana-lysis or meaning for the glyphsto prove the translation.

Hungarian Vilmos Hevesypublished an article in 1932,claiming that Rongorongo andthe Indus Valley script were re-

lated because theyhad some similarit-ies. However, sinceboth scripts areundeciphered, werefound on differentsides of the world(the Indus Valleybeing in the regionof Afghanistan),and have their ori-gins an estimated4000 years apart,this connection isvery unlikely.

Independentlinguist Steven

Fischer announced in 1995 thathe had “cracked the Rongorongocode”. He noted that the text ofthe Santiago Staff was differentfrom the others, in that it had“punctuation” in the form of ver-tical lines in many place. He alsointerpreted a particular glyph asa phallic symbol, which hetranslated as “copulated”. Thisresults in his translation con-taining several references to an-imals and objects copulatingwith each other, such as “fishcopulated with the sun”, whichmany scholars have disregardedas just silly. Fischer also claimsto have deciphered the PhaistosDisc, but that too is disregardedas valid because, in both cases,too many assumptions are madethat only relate to a smallvolume of the known text.

ConclusionFrom what was learned from thenatives of Easter Island as wellas linguistic analysis, the Ron-gorongo script is most likely nota true writing system or lan-guage. If so, then the meaningand purpose of the texts and theobjects they were written on willnever be discovered. We can besure, however, that people willcontinue to have their own ideason what they mean. PT

Rongorongo tablet shaped like fish

Some of the Rongorongo texts were carved into wood that wouldwash up on the beach

OOttttoo DDeemmppwwoollffffwwaass aa mmeeddiiccaall ooffffiicceerr wwhhoossee

ttrraavveellss ppuutt hhiimm iinnttoo ccoonnttaacctt wwiitthh tthheeppeeooppllee ooff tthhee PPoollyynneessiiaann iissllaannddss.. WWhheennrreettiirreedd ffrroomm bbeeiinngg aa ddooccttoorr,, hhee aaccttiivveellyy

ssttuuddiieedd tthhee llaanngguuaaggeess,, aanndd iinn ddooiinngg ssoo,,pprroodduucceedd aa bbooddyy ooff wwoorrkk tthhaatt iiss ssttiillll

bbeeiinngg uusseedd ttooddaayy..

Otto Dempwolff

IIssllaannddss ooff LLaanngguuaaggee

Otto Dempwolff - Islands of Language


German linguist and anthropologistOtto Dempwolff started as a medical manand soldier, but later found a path tostudying languages, and he became fam-ous for his research into Austronesianlanguages.

His LifeOtto Henry Louis August Dempwolff wasborn on May 25, 1871 , in Pillau, Provinceof Prussia, as the first of two children. Hegraduated from the Luisen-Gymnasium inMemel in 1888 then went on to studymedicine at various universities, includingBerlin, Königsberg, Tübingen, Marburgand Leipzig. He received his doctoratefrom Berlin in 1892 then took his final ex-ams the next year in Tübingen.

Dempwolff completed his military ser-vice in Munich, spending the last monthsof it as a doctor in Tilsit, Hamburg. Afterthat, he applied for a job in tropical medi-cine at the New Guinea Company, but wasturned down because he was too young.He was advised by them to gain more ex-perience, so he served for two trips toSouth America as a ship’s doctor, andwhen he returned, he was given a contractwith the company, where he worked from1895 to 1897. After leaving them, he madeanother two trips to South America, againas a ship’s doctor.

Dempwolff served as a medical officerin the imperial protection force of the Ger-man Southwest and East Africa from 1898to 1911 . During that time, he was part ofa two-year expedition for malaria researchwith Robert Koch in German New Guineafrom 1901 to 1903. However, he fell illwith malaria a few times, and finallyresigned from the force in 1911 . Duringhis travels, he worked with the Melane-sian languages of the Pacific as well asSandawe in Africa. He also examined theextinction of some of the nations on theislands.

Dempwolff worked for a few monthsas a doctor in the Colonial Office in Lon-don and it was here that he met CarlMeinhof, a German linguist, and the twobegan a lifelong friendship. It may havebeen that meeting and friendship that firstgot him really interested in linguistics. Hebegan studying at the Hamburg ColonialInstitute, which is now the University ofHamburg, in 1911 .

At the end of 1913, Dempwolff

traveled for the third time to New Guinea,but this time as a private individual forhis own language studies. However, whenthe first World War hit the region, he in-terned in Australia before being deportedback to Germany, where he spent the restof the war as a military doctor in Saar-brücken and Silesia.

In 1919, the University of Hamburgwas founded officially by a formal decreeof parliament, and it was the first uni-versity in Germany with a true democraticfoundation. In its first years, Austronesianand African studies were part of a com-mon curriculum. It was then that Demp-wolff started working in the Department ofAfrican and South Seas languages there,

under his friend Professor Meinhof. Heworked a little with the African languages,but he was mostly involved with theMelanesian and Austronesian languages,and in 1920, he wrote his habilitationthesis (the highest academic qualificationa scholar can achieve on his own pursuit)on Indonesian lip sounds, Die Lautents-prechungen der indonesischen Lippenlaute

in einigen anderen austronesischen Sprac-

hen.In 1931 , on his 60th birthday, Demp-

wolff received an honorary doctorate fromthe University of Hamburg and becamehead of the newly created Seminar für In-donesische und Südseesprachen (Instituteof Indonesian and Pacific Languages),which is still active today, focusing on thewhole of Austronesia, including not justIndonesia, but also Malaysia and the Phil-ippines, Madagascar and the South Pa-cific. Dempwolff died in Hamburg in 1938at the age of 67.

His WorkAmong Dempwolff’s achievements is histhree-volume work phonology of Aus-tronesian, Vergleichende Lautlehre desaustronesischenWortschatzes (Comparat-ive phonology of Austronesian vocabulary)

“This was the first publishedcomprehensive theory abouthow many of the languagesspoken on the islands ofSoutheast Asia and the PacificOcean could be traced back toone original proto-language.

Carl Meinhof

Otto Dempwolff - Islands of Language


(1 91 6) Die Sandawe, Linguistisches und ethnographisches Material aus Deutsch Ostafrika,Abhandlungen des Hamburger Kolonialinstituts. (The Sandawe, l inguistic and ethnographicmaterial from German East Africa, treatises the Hamburg Colonial Institute. )

(1 920) Die Lautentsprechungen der indonesischen Lippenlaute in einigen anderenaustronesischen Sprachen, Habilitationsschrift. (The sound correspondences of the Indonesianl ip sounds in some other Languages, habil itation.)

(1 934) Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes, Band 1 : InduktiverAufbau einer indonesischen Ursprache. (Comparative phonology of Austronesian vocabulary,Volume 1 : Inductive construction of a Indonesian protolanguage.)

(1 937) Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes, Band 2: DeduktiveAnwendung des Urindonesischen auf austronesische Einzelsprachen. (Comparativephonology of Austronesian vocabulary, Volume 2: Application of Deductive of a Single Proto-Indonesian Austronesian Language)

(1 938) Vergleichende Lautlehre des austronesischen Wortschatzes, Band 3: AustronesischesWörterverzeichnis (Comparative phonology of Austronesian vocabulary, Volume 3: AustronesianGlossary)

(1 939) Grammatik der Jabêm-Sprache auf Neuguinea. (Jabem-language grammar of NewGuinea)

PARTIAL LIST OF WORKS

published between 1934 and1938. This was the first pub-lished comprehensive theoryabout how many of the lan-guages spoken on the islands ofSoutheast Asia and the PacificOcean could be traced back toone original proto-language.

The work he devoted themost time to before his deathwas a grammatical description ofJabêm, Grammatik der Jabêm-Sprache aufNeuguinea (Jabem-language grammar of NewGuinea), published after hisdeath in 1939. Jabêm is an Aus-tronesian language which wasadopted by the German Luther-an mission church in what isnow Morobe Province, PapuaNew Guinea, and it was at theirrequest that Dempwolff wrotethe grammar. He made sure thathis grammatical description wasunderstandable to the lay per-son, especially since he con-

sidered Jabêm to be the mostdifficult Melanesian language hehad ever encountered. This workwas very well done, and is stillgreatly used today. PT Univeristy of Hamburg, main building

TTaahhiittii

At the Cinema - Whale Rider


Warning: This review does give away

the whole story, but the story is not

hard to guess from the title and first 10

minutes ofthe film.

he movie Whale Rider, basedupon a book of the same name,focuses on the culture of the

Māori people of New Zealand. Themain character is Paikea, a 12-yearold girl. Paikea is the name of a greatchief who rode on top of a whale andbringing his people from Hawaiki. Heis the one the chief line is directly des-cended from.

This Paikea, however, was born asa paternal twin, but her brother diedin childbirth, along with her mother.She is the granddaughter of the tribe’schief, Koro, and her brother wouldhave become the new chief. SincePaikea is a girl, she can not take onthat role, which upsets Koro greatly.When Paikea is born, Koro blamesPaikea’s father, Porourangi, for this,and so Porourangi leaves the tribe, let-ting Koro and his wife, Nanny Flowers,raise Paikea.

While Koro does come to careabout Paikea, he can’t truly accept herand even blames her for the tribe be-ing “in dark times”. Paikea constantlytries to please him by becoming wellversed in the traditions and rituals ofher people, but he ignores herachievements. In order to find a newchief, Koro starts a school to teach theboys that are of the proper age to be-come the new leader. He bans Paikeafrom it, but she still manages to learnfrom them. When Koro starts teachingthem the ways of the taiaha, the tradi-

tional fighting stick, she turns to heruncle Rawiri to train her. Koro even-tually finds out, after Paikea defeatsone of the boys, Hemi, in a taiahafight, and in his anger, tells Paikeathat she has broken the line of chiefs.

This pattern continues to be re-peated throughout the film, withPaikea trying to prove herself as aleader while Koro continues to ban herfrom doing so while himself fallingfurther into despair and bitterness.When all of the boys fail the last testof recovering the rei puta, a whaletooth worn around Koro’s neck, whenhe throws it into the ocean, Koro takesto his bed, shutting out everyonecompletely.

The movie plot is very simple tofollow, and most people can alreadyguess the ending, especially from thetitle. You know that eventually Paikeawill ride a whale and become the newchief, thus proving to Koro that wo-men can be leaders too. This is theuplifting lesson that most people takeaway from the movie. I think themovie is more interesting because ofthe look at the Māori culture.

First, we see the tribe as rathermodern people. They live in normalhouses, drive cars, etc. , and are not,as often displayed to tourists, as

At the Cinema

Whale Rider

Whale RiderPG-1 3 1 01 minDrama / Family4 July 2003 (USA)

Country: New Zealand /Germany

Languages: English / Maori

“Paikea constantlytries to pleasehim by becomingwell versed in thetraditions andrituals of herpeople, but heignores herachievements.

Carving of legendary Paikea riding a whale

At the Cinema - Whale Rider


quaint grass skirtwearing primit-ives. In fact, Por-ourangi istraveling Europeas an artist. Inthe end, we do seethem performinga traditionaldance, but is partof a celebration.

While they are modern, they still have a senseof their culture and traditions, which is very goodin this world where so many people are losingtheirs. A number of times, Paikea recites chants inMāori, as does Nanny Flowers. Before he left forEurope, Porourangi was building a waka, which isa large canoe for many people. This one was 60feet in length, and Paikea often sits in it at night tolook out over the ocean.

The climax of the movie involves severalwhales beaching themselves by Paikea’s house.The entire tribe comes to try to save the whales,staying up all night pouring ocean water frombuckets on them until the tide can come back in.This shows that the people of the tribe still con-nect with their heritage and nature. Koro finds thelargest one, the leader, which is supposedly theone that the legendary Paikea rode upon. Koro ex-plains to the others that if they can get that whaleinto the water, the others will follow, so every at-tempts to do just that as the tide comes in. Allhelp except Paikea, because Koro has forbiddenher to touch it, telling her she has done enoughdamage already. They fail to move it, and as theyleave it to get some rest before trying again, Paikeawalks unseen to it, climbs on it, and rides it intothe ocean, thus saving it and all the other whales,although she almost drowns in the process. It isthis action, along with recovering Koro’s whaletooth from where he threw it, which finally con-vinces Koro that he has been wrong.

While I thought the movie was well done, and Idid understand the point about women can beleaders as well as we can’t force people to be whatthey aren’t (nor deny what they are), I have to con-

fess I was a bitconfused and dis-appointed by theending.

First of all,while Koro finallysaw that he hadbeen wrong, heonly comes to ac-cept Paikea whenshe fulfills his

wishes. This is a man that has forsaken both hissons, the local boys, and Paikea because theydidn’t match up to what he wanted. He doesn’tseem to change any of that, instead only acceptingPaikea when she proves she is a leader. To me, itwasn’t that he had learned a lesson, but rather, hehad been given what he wanted after he behavedbadly. It felt to me like a child who wants a toyand when told no, gets angry, throws a tantrum,and shuts out everyone until he gets the toy, atwhich point, he is all happy again.

Second of all, the main thrust of Koro’s needfor the leader seemed to be because the com-munity was falling apart and they were “in darktimes”. We get a few glimpses of this, like in seeinghow Hemi’s father acts with some friends.However, the closing scene shows Paikea’s fatherhas returned, people launching the waka and row-ing out intoocean, and othermembers of thecommunity per-forming a tradi-tional dance. Allthis because theyhave declaredPaikea the leader?To me, it makes abad commentaryon the people, forit would seem they are unable to deal with any-thing unless they have an official leader.

Lastly, I was confused about Koro’s role in allof this. According to his claims about the familyline of chiefs, it would seem he was the chief of thetribe. He was chief when Paikea was born, but wenever see him in that role. He is never shown to beleading anything. Since his grandson, had helived, would not have been able to become chief formany more years, Koro should have still beenleading the tribe, and thus any decline would behis fault, not his son’s nor Paikea’s. He speaks somuch about what is needed to be a leader, butnever shows those traits in himself. Perhaps thatis how his character was supposed to be, but thatjust made the ending, with him getting what hewants, seem even worse to me. It teaches me thatyou can be irresponsible and nasty to everyoneand be rewarded in the end.

Despite my feelings about the ending and pos-sible confusion over the what Koro is really doing,the movie is very enjoyable to watch and does in-clude plenty of Māori culture and language. Iwould be interested in hearing what others thinkabout the movie’s depiction of the Māori culture,especially those that have first hand knowledge.PT

Paikea in traditional costume

Father and son, always banging heads

Paikea in her father's uncompleted waka

A young woman danceson the Tuvalu stage at the2011 Pasifika festival,Auckland, New Zealand.

Celebrations - Pasifika Festival


very year in March, New Zealand holds thePasifika Festival in its largest city, Aukland.Popularly called ’Pasifika’, it is the largest

event of its kind in the world, with its theme of thePacific Islands, and it draws in over 225 thousandvisitors every year.

HistoryThe roots of this festival probably go back to the1980s. During that time, Tala Cleverley, the firstPacific person to be elected to a New Zealand localgovernment jurisdiction, was on the WellingtonCity Council. As part of the city’s long-runningSummer City program, she initiated and developeda Pacific festival to be part of the celebration. Shegot the Pacific churches and other various groupsinvolved, to make surethe rest of the com-munity was tied in. By1982, a variety of fest-ivals had begun, givingpeople a chance to dis-play their cultures. Thesefestivals continued untilaround 1990 and consisted largely of entertain-ment programs, food, information about the cul-tures, and art areas. However, they also began tobring in Western practices as well and began de-creasing in popularity. Soon, there were almost nopublic festivals of Pacific cultures.

BirthThe Pasifika Festival came into existence in 1992when the then Auckland City Council and theSouth Pacific Island Nations Development Associ-ation wanted to bring the Pacific Island communit-ies closer together again by celebrating therichness and variety of their cultures, traditionsand lifestyles. A Pacific Island fashion show andtheatre performances were incorporated into it in1993, and over 20,000 people attended it in only

the festival’s second year. This festival continuedto grow over the years, as did the number ofpeople attending it. Between 1995 and 2000, anestimated 30,000 to 50,000 people attendedPasifika each year.

A “village” concept was introduced in 1998 asa way of further showing each Pacific island’s di-versity. The festival is split up into “villages” of in-dividual island communities, representing the tenislands of Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Niue, Samoa,Tahiti, Tokelau, Tonga, Tuvalu and Aotearoa (theMāori name for New Zealand).

CelebrationsMost of the Pasifika events take place in WesternSprings Stadium and start with concerts on a Fri-day evening. Many musical acts that perform aretop-name Polynesian artists. The concert is free,and lasts for a few hours.

On Saturday, thousands of people crowd thestadium again to enjoy the numerous shows bythe various villages, as well as the craft shows.They sample the huge variety of Polynesian food as

CCeelleebbrraattiioonnss

PPaassii ffiikkaa FFeessttiivvaa ll

It now involvesmultiple stages,sports, and over300 stalls for foodand games.

Entrance to one of the “villages” that make up the festival.



well in this day longcelebration. It now in-volves multiple stages,sports, and over 300stalls for food andgames.

The Pasifika Festiv-al itself is just 2 days,but the entire month ofMarch is full of relatedevents and activities.Some of the events thathappen during the restof the March, as part ofthe Pasifika Festivalidea, include sportingevents, sculpture exhibitions, film viewings, vari-ous workshops, kid’s activities and much more.

The years have marked a number of importantmilestones for the festival. A record number ofpeople attended the festival in 2001 , which wonthe festival the Creative New Zealand’s CreativePlaces Award. Between 2002 and 2004, the num-ber of community stallholders exceeded 300 forthe first time and it is estimated that over one mil-lion dollars was spent during the 2002 festival.

In 2005, the inaugural Pacific Music Awardswere introduced at the Air New Zealand OpeningNight Concert, and these continued on as a stand-alone celebration of Pacific musical talent. Anotheraward was won on the festival’s 15th anniversaryin 2007 with the Best Established Event awardfrom NZAEP (New Zealand Association of EventProfessionals) . It highlighted the efforts of past andpresent project managers, along with the the teamof community workers and volunteers. In 2010, asix-day program was begun as part of the monthsactivities. This included a number of ticketedevents at other locations, including “Po”, a tribalpop opera by pop artist Mika.

Beyond PasifikaJust as the original festivals of the 1980s inspiredthe Pasifika Festival, so it too has inspired otherfestivals. In 2001 , the Christchurch’s Pacific Un-derground established the Pacific Arts Festival. Itis a day for the family, with a format similar toPasifika. Three years after that, Tai TokerauPasifika became the first Pacific festival in theNorthland region.

The Pacific in the Park festival began in WestAukland in 2005. It is also family-oriented andwas, oddly enough, developed from a road safetycampaign created by local policeman Faga Siaki. Ithas an afternoon and evening of mainly modernentertainment in which a number of social agen-cies attend and engage the Pacific communities.

In 2006, two more festivals were held for thefirst time. One was a second festival in the North-land area, in Kaitaia, and the other was the Auck-land’s North Shore Pasefika Festival. Both of theseevents have a specific sports focus, promotingteam competition and healthy lifestyles. Two morefestivals were also begun in 2009: Hamilton’s Ne-sian Festival and Rotorua’s Mini Pasifika Festival.These will run biannually along with the city’sGlobalfest.

Learning MoreIf you wish to learn more about the annualPasifika Festival, there are a number of sites on-line that will give you details on dates of it andsurrounding events, as well as where is best tostay in Aukland for the event. This celebrationgoes far in helping to not only showcase the cul-tures of the islands, but also help revive andmaintain their history and traditions. We hope thecontinue for many more years to come. PT

One of the many stalls displayingtraditional crafts.

Some of the dancers during the festival Some dancers waiting to perform



Woman at her stall during the festival Food stall with various foods and drinks for sale

Stall displaying various tradtional Tapa cloths for saleWomen dancing in traditional costume

Young dancers practicingArt for sale at the Pasifika Festival

Below are other pictures from various parts of the fesitval activities.Thanks to Yortw and kylepost photography for these wonderful pictures!

Special Feature


anguage and culture are al-ways intertwined. We gain

some knowledge of a culturewhen we learn its language, andwhen we learn about a culture,we have to incorporate the lan-guage.

Sometimes, the two becomeeven more closely linked. That isthe case the Raga language, theAvoiuli writing system, and sanddrawing, in which a traditionhelped give birth to a new writ-ing system for a language.

VanuatuIn the South Pacific Ocean is theisland nation of Vanuatu. It isan archipelago, or group of is-lands, which was first inhabitedby Melanesian people. The firstEuropeans arrived there in 1605in the form of a Spanish expedi-tion, led by a Portuguese navig-ator named Fernades deQueirós. They claimed the is-lands for Spain and named theisland they landed on Espirtu

Santo, or “Holy Spirit”. No moreEuropeans returned until 1768,when Louis Antoine de Bougain-ville, a French admiral and ex-plorer, rediscovered the islands.Several years later, in 1774,Captain Cook named the islands“New Hebrides”.

The United Kingdom andFrance both claimed parts of thearchipelago in the 1880s, andfor many years, the island wasmanaged by a British-FrenchCondominium, a unique form ofgovernment, with separate gov-ernmental systems. This was adisaster, with a duplication oflaws, police forces, prisons, cur-rencies, education and healthsystems. Under this rule, thenative Melanesians were bannedfrom becoming citizens of eitherpower, becoming officially state-less.

Thankfully, in the 1970s, anindependence movement arose,and the Republic of Vanuatuwas founded in 1980. The newname was derived from the wordvanua (“land” or “home”) and theword tu (“stand”) , reflecting itsnew independence.

RagaAlthough among the islands ofVanuatu the official languagesare Bislama, English andFrench, the language of Raga isalso widely in use. Sometimesknown as Hano, Raga had an es-timated 6,500 speakers (as of

2000), which makes it the sev-enth largest of Vanuatu’s hun-dred or more languages, as wellas Pentecost Island’s secondlargest. It is an Austronesianlanguage and has borrowedmany words from Bislama, al-though there is a movement toreplace those with new Ragawords.

Raga spread to the other is-Nakamal (traditional meeting house) in

Vanwoki village, Pentecost Island, Vanuatu

Special Feature

AAvvooiiuullii

Special Feature


lands as people emigrated fromPentecost, sometimes creatingnew dialects of the language.However, it is now relatively ho-mogeneous, with the last dis-tinctive dialect, Nggasai,becoming extinct when it’s lastnative speaker died in 1999. Ingeneral, Raga is considered aneasy language to learn, and it isknown as a second language bymany speakers of other Vanuatulanguages. While a few gram-matical sketches, vocabularylists and short papers have beenpublished on Raga, there is nothorough description of the lan-guage.

Sand DrawingSand has long been a medium ofart and communication for thou-sands of years in many parts ofthe world. Tibetan monks createmandalas with colored powder,and these are used to to teach.Native Americans use naturallycoloured sand to make paintingson the grounds of their sacredlodges. Indigenous AustralianAborigines have used sandpaintings for both story tellingand recording history.

In Vanuatu, another form ofsand drawing exists as part ofthe culture. Known also as san-doing in Bislama, the sanddrawing of Vanuatu is a ritualtradition, even recognized byUNESCO (United Nations Edu-cational, Scientific and CulturalOrganization) as a “Masterpieceof the Oral and Intangible Herit-age of Humanity”.

These drawings are createdin the most basic method of us-ing a single finger to trace a con-tinuous line in sand or wet clay.

The patterns are composed ofgraceful curves and are normallysymmetrical. Not merely artistic,these drawings are also a meansof communication among over80 different languages in the re-gion. They act as mnemonicdevices (learning techniques thataid in information retention) torecord and teach rituals, mytho-logy, histories, and more. Mostof these are very intricate, withmany meanings, and can oftenbe read in many ways. Mastersof this tradition must be able tonot only create them but also in-terpret them for others. It isprobably more accurate to viewthis as a form of writing, ratherthan art.

Sadly, this tradition, likemany old cultural practices, islosing its importance, with manyof the drawings being used justas graphics in advertising or astourist displays. These beautifulsymbols of Vanuatu identity areoften shown as a form of decor-ative folklore, and if sand draw-ings become only viewed on anartistic level, they will lose thetradition’s deeper symbolic signi-ficance and social function. A“National Action Plan for theSafeguarding of Sand Drawing”has been created by theVanuatu Cultural Centre, withthe help of the Save Sand Draw-ings Action Committee and UN-ESCO to help keep this traditionalive.

AvoiuliDespite this danger of lostmeaning, one aspect of thesesand drawings has actuallyevolved into another form. Overa period of 14 years, Chief Vira-leo Boborenvanua developed awriting system based on thedesigns in traditional sanddrawings. It was intended as analternative to the Latin alphabet,containing equivalent charactersfor the letters A through Z, num-bers and a few other symbols. Itwas named Avoiuli, from the

Raga words avoi (“talk about”)and uli (“draw” or “paint”) . Avoi-uli is used mainly for writingRaga, but can also be used forwriting English, Apma, and Bis-lama.

Like the sand drawings, theletters of Avoiuli are drawn usinga single stroke, and these letterscan be written either right-to-leftor left-to-right. Furthermore,each word can be written usinga single continuous stroke.

Avoiuli is taught at a schoolin Lavatmanggemu in north-eastern Pentecost, and scholarswill often pay large school fees tolearn it. It is also used for recordkeeping in the Tangbunia indi-genous bank, which deals withmany traditional forms ofwealth, like shells, mats andboar tusks.

It is not uncommon for lan-guages to have new writing sys-tems created for them, but it israre for those writing systems tocome from a cultural practice.Do you know of similar occur-rences in other languages? If so,please tell us about it. PT

Image of sand drawing from Vanuatu

Carved stone at Lavatmanggemu inscribedwith the names of local figures in the Avoiulialphabet

PacificAArree yyoouu ddrreeaammiinngg ooff aa bbuunnggaallooww iinn TTaahhiittii??

DDoo yyoouu wwiisshh ttoo mmeeeett tthhee ffrriieennddlliieesstt ppeeooppllee oonneeaarrtthh iinn FFiijjii??

AArree yyoouu ddrraawwnn ttoo tthhee ssiigghhttss aanndd ssmmeellllss ooff aattrraaddiittiioonnaall HHaawwaaiiiiaann lluuaauu??

I

IslandsFFoorr cceennttuurriieess,, tthhee iissllaannddss ooff tthhee SSoouutthh PPaacciiffiicc hhaavveebbeeeenn tthhee ddeessttiinnaattiioonn ffoorr ttrrooppiiccaall bbeeaauuttyy aannddrroommaannttiicc ggeettaawwaayyss..

WWhhaatt aarree yyoouu wwaaiittiinngg ffoorr?? TThhee PPaacciiffiicc IIssllaannddss aarreewwaaiittiinngg ttoo sshhooww yyoouu wwhhaatt aa ttrruuee ppaarraaddiissee iiss!!

Languages in Peril - The Island Invasion


he Malayo-Polynesian lan-guages are a subgroup of

the Austronesian languages andare spoken on the island nationsof Southeast Asia and the PacificOcean. Most of these languagesbelong to smaller groups of indi-genous people who have sufferedfrom European colonization, of-ten driving them to the edge ofextinction. We are going to lookat the history and situation ofthree of them: Rapa Nui,Chamorro and Rotuman.

Rapa NuiRapa Nui, also called Pascuan,is an Eastern Polynesian lan-guage. It is spoken by the RapaNui people living in Chile and onthe island of Rapa Nui (alsocalled Easter Island) which is aspecial territory of it. It is un-known how many people cur-rently speak Rapa Nui, but theestimate is under 3000, withmost of those speaking Rapa Nuias a minor language, the domin-ant language of the region beingSpanish. Easter Island is one ofthe most remote inhabited is-lands in the world, and the RapaNui language is isolated from theother Eastern Polynesian lan-guages.

Polynesian people settled onEaster Island some time betweenfrom 300 to 1200 CE. The cre-ated a strong culture and thrived

for a time, but the isolation ofthe island worked against them.They became overpopulated andused up most of the islands nat-ural resources. When Europeanexplorers arrived on the islandin 1722, the population hadgone from a civilization of 15000to one of just 3000. Diseasesbrought by the Europeans alsoaided in reducing the populationeven further.

The name “Easter Island”was given to it by the Dutch ex-plorer Jacob Roggeveen, the is-land’s first recorded Europeanvisitor. He found it on EasterSunday, so named it Paasch-Eyland, which was Dutch for“Easter Island”. The officialname of the island is Isla dePascua, which also means “East-er Island”. The Polynesian name

for it, Rapa Nui, means “BigRapa”, and was given to it dur-ing slave raids of the 1860s be-cause of its topographicsimilarity to the island of Rapain the Bass Islands of the Aus-tral Islands group.

Spanish explorer FelipeGonzález de Ahedo traveled tothe island in 1770 and claimedit for Spain. Much of Rapa Nuivocabulary is taken from Tahi-tian, mixing it with older formsof the language. When CaptainJames Cook visited the islandfour years later, he had a Tahi-tian interpreter with him. Theinterpreter recognized somePolynesian words, but was un-able to converse with the is-landers. Many of the words,such as the numbers from oneto ten, don’t seem to have any

LLaanngguuaaggeess iinn PPeerriill

TThhee II ss ll aanndd II nnvvaass iioonn

Tamure Dancers, Easter Island



relation to any other known lan-guage.

In the 1860s, the Peruviansneeded more people for doinglabor and so they started raidingisland for free labor in the formsof slaves. Easter Island becamea target. Eight Peruvian shipslanded there in 1862 and cap-tured around 1000 Easter Is-landers, including the king, hisson, and the ritual priests. Overthe the years, hundreds morewere taken. Most of those cap-tured did not survive long inPeru.

When the Bishop of Tahitifinally protested this activity, hehad the surviving Rapa Nuigathered and sent them back totheir island. On the way, theship broke out in smallpox, andonly 15 natives made it back tothe island. They carried the sick-ness with them, however, and asmallpox epidemic nearly wipedout the remaining island popula-tion. Continued contact withoutsiders caused the people andlanguage even further decline, asRapa Nui became diluted by thelocal Tahitian pidgin.

Easter Island was annexedby Chile in 1888 by PolicarpoToro, a Chilean naval officer, un-der the Tratado de Anexión de laisla (“Treaty of Annexation of the

Island”) . The validity of thistreaty is still contested by someRapa Nui natives. The survivingRapa Nui people were confinedto Hanga Roa, the capital of theisland, until the 1960s, whenthe island was reopened in itsentirety and the natives weregiven Chilean citizenship.

Father Sebastian Englert, aGerman missionary who lived onEaster Island between 1935 and1969, published a partial RapaNui–Spanish dictionary in 1948,attempting to save what hecould of the old language. It con-tained many typographical mis-takes but still contained a largeamount of material, recordingnot only the language but alsosome of the oral traditions andconversations.

Today, Spanish is the mostwidely spoken language on East-er Island and the primary lan-guage of education andadministration. Rapa Nui is be-ing influenced still, slowly shift-ing to a more Spanish sentencestructure. With so few nativespeakers left and the currentspeakers mainly knowing it as asecondary language, it is un-known how much longer RapaNui will continue to exist.

ChamorroChamorro is a Malayo-Polyne-sian language spoken by thenative Chamorro people of theMariana Islands, which includeGuam. Chamorro people alsolive in several United Statesstates including California,Hawaii, Nevada, Texas andWashington. According to the2000 Census, approximately

65,000 people of Chamorro an-cestry live on Guam, 19,000 inthe Northern Marianas, and an-other 93,000 live outside theMariana Islands.

The Chamorro people camefrom Southeast Asia around2000 BC and are most closelyrelated to other Austronesiannatives to the west in the Philip-pines and Taiwan. They werefirst encountered by explorerFerdinand Magellan in 1521 .Later Spanish explorers namedthe inhabitants of the islands

They carried the sicknesswith them, however, and asmallpox epidemic nearlywiped out the remainingisland population.

Kutturan Chamorro Performers

Chamorro people in 1915



“Chamurres”, which was derivedfrom a local term for “uppercaste”, but this was eventuallyconverted to “Chamorros” froman old Spanish term for “bald”,referring, perhaps, to the nativemales habit of shaving theirheads. This last part is hard toconfirm, as various visitors re-ported different hairstyles for thenatives.

During its time as a Span-ish colony, the Chamorro popu-lation was greatly reduced by thedisease the Europeans broughtwith them. The Spanish also in-troduced many changes in thesociety, killing many Chamorromen and relocating most of theremaining population others toGuam. There, they lived in sev-eral parishes to prevent rebel-lion. An estimated 100,000Chamorro natives that had livedon the islands before Europeanswere reduced to under 10,000by 1800. In the parishes, the

Spanish worked tocovert the nativesto Catholicism. TheChamorro were giv-en Spanish sur-names. SinceGuam was a Span-ish colony for over300 years, manyChamorro wordsare derived fromSpanish. The tradi-tional Chamorronumber systemwas replaced bySpanish numbers.

In 1898, the United Statescaptured the island during theSpanish-American War. This didnot end trouble for theChamorro people, however. In

Guam, the language sufferedsuppression when the U.S. Gov-ernment banned it completelyfrom schools in 1922. AllChamorro dictionaries were col-lected and burned. This contin-ued during the Japaneseoccupation of the area duringWorld War II and when it was re-turned to the US after the war.Only English was allowed to betaught in the schools, and stu-dents who spoke their nativetongue were punished.

When at last their oppress-ive polices were removed, thedamage to the language andpeople had already been done.New generations had childrenraise in families in which onlythe oldest members were fluent,making it difficult for the chil-dren to learn the language. Eng-lish eventually replacedChamorro as the common lan-guage. More and more Chamor-ros, especially youth, are alsorelocating to the US mainland,and that makes preserving theChamorro identity even moredifficult.

There is still hope for thelanguage, though. In the North-ern Mariana Islands, youngChamorros still speak the lan-guage fluently, and it is stillcommon among Chamorrohouseholds. There has also beena growing interest in reviving thelanguage, and all public schoolson both Guam and the theNorthern Mariana Islands arenow required, by law, to teachthe Chamorro language as partof their standard curriculum.Furthermore, because the Mari-anas are a part of the UnitedStates, the Chamorro peoplenow enjoy greater economic op-portunities than many other Mi-cronesian peoples.

On Guam, a Chamorrorights movement has developedsince the United States regainedcontrol of the island. Leaders ofthe movement are seeking to re-turn the ancestral lands to the

When at last theiroppressive polices wereremoved, the damage tothe language and peoplehad already been done.

Mofmanu Beach, Rotuma



Chamorro people. It is im-possible to tell, however, if theseefforts will be enough to save theChamorro identity and language.

RotumanRotuman, also called Rotunan,is a Malayo-Polynesian languagespoken by the native people ofthe island Rotuma, which is partof the South Pacific Islandsgroup. Rotuma is a Fijian de-pendency, and many Rotumanslive on Fiji as well. There are anestimated 2000 Rotumans, ac-cording to the 2007 census, butit is unknown how many ofthose are native or second lan-guage speakers of Rotuman. Theisland has long been a culturalmelting pot of the Micronesian,Melanesian and Polynesiangroups, and so the indigenousRotuman share many of thesame cultural traits as it’sneighbors.

The first inhabitants of theisland were probably the ancient

seafaring people,the Lapita, some5,000 to 6,000years ago. Afterthem, waves of Mi-cronesians wouldhave migrated tothe island. ThePolynesians wouldhave been the lastto come to the is-land, which gives ita similar but dis-tinct language andcultural heritage

from any of its ancestors.The first recorded European

contact with Rotuma was in1791 . British Captain EdwardEdwards and the crew of HMSPandora landed on the islandwhile searching for sailors whohad disappeared following theMutiny on the Bounty. In themid-nineteenth century, Rotumabecame a safe haven for desert-ing sailors. Some of them mar-ried local women, contributingtheir genes to the already highlymixed pool.

A United States exploringexpedition arrived on Rotumain1840. Wesleyan missionariesfrom Tonga came to the island in1842, and they were followed byCatholic Marists in 1847. Con-flicts between the groups brokeout and the local chiefs finallyasked Britain to annex the is-land in order to put an end tothe fighting, which Britain did in1881 . It became part of theUnited Kingdom a few years

after Fiji became a colony andwas put under Fiji’s control. TheBritish granted Fiji independ-ence in 1970, and Rotuma re-mained part of Fiji.

The mix of peoples and cul-tures over the millenniumsmakes it difficult to properlycategorise the people. While theyphysically most resemble thePolynesian people of Samoa andTonga, the Rotuman musicalstyle of chanting is similar totraditional Tahitian or Maoristyles. The language itself is dis-tinctive from the neighboringPolynesian neighbors and ismore closely similar to theMelanesian languages of Fiji.

The language is even moreinteresting to linguists becauseit uses metathesis, in which itswaps the the final vowel in aword with the consonant beforeit. This results in a vowel systemthat employs umlauts, vowelshortening or extending anddiphthongisation (when a singlevowel sound shifts to a two-vow-el vocalization).

The Rotumans managed toescape much of the damage nor-mally brought when a nativepopulation meets Europeans, sothe language has not been asoppressed. However, it is stillconsidered vulnerable, due tothe newer generations adoptingEnglish or Fijan as their primarylanguage. PT

Council of Chiefs of Rotuma, 1927

Panorama of Anakena, Easter Island

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Revisted - Legends of Maui - Maui's Home


[Editor’s note: This article is a reprintfrom “Legends of Ma-Ui, a DemiGod of Polynesia and of his MotherHina” by W. D. Westervelt. I t waspublished in 1 91 0. ]

aui is a demi god. TheMaui story probably con-tains a larger number ofunique and ancient

myths than that of any other le-gendary character in the mytho-logy of any nation. The Mauilegends form one of thestrongest links in the mytholo-gical chain of evidence whichbinds the scattered inhabitantsof the Pacific into one nation.

“Akalana was the man;

Hina-a-ke-ahi was the wife;

Maui First was born;

Then Maui-waena;

Maui Kiikii was born;

Then Maui ofthe malo.”

--Queen Liliuokalani’s FamilyChant.

Four brothers, each bearingthe name of Maui, belong toHawaiian legend. They accom-plished little as a family, excepton special occasions when theyoungest of the householdawakened his brothers by someunexpected trick which drewthem into unwonted action. Thelegends of Hawaii, Tonga, Tahiti,New Zealand and the Herveygroup make this youngest Maui“the discoverer of fire” or “theensnarer of the sun” or “the fish-

erman who pulls up islands” or“the man endowed with magic,”or “Maui with spirit power.” Thelegends vary somewhat, ofcourse, but not as much asmight be expected when thethousands of miles between vari-ous groups of islands are takeninto consideration.

Maui was one of the Polyne-sian demi-gods. His parents be-longed to the family ofsupernatural beings. He himselfwas possessed of supernaturalpowers and was supposed tomake use of all manner of en-chantments. In New Zealand an-tiquity a Maui was said to haveassisted other gods in the cre-ation of man. Nevertheless Mauiwas very human. He lived inthatched houses, had wives andchildren, and was scolded by thewomen for not properly support-ing his household.

The time of his sojournamong men is very indefinite. InHawaiian genealogies Maui andhis brothers were placed amongthe descendants of Ulu and “thesons of Kii,” and Maui was oneof the ancestors of Kame-hameha, the first king of theunited Hawaiian Islands. Thiswould place him in the seventhor eighth century of the Christi-an Era. But it is more probablethat Maui belongs to the mist-land of time. His mischievouspranks with the various godswould make him another Mer-cury living in any age from the

creation to the beginning of theChristian era.

The Hervey Island legendsstate that Maui’s father was “thesupporter of the heavens” andhis mother “the guardian of theroad to the invisible world.”

In the Hawaiian chant,Akalana was the name of hisfather. In other groups this wasthe name by which his motherwas known. Kanaloa, the god, issometimes known as the fatherof Maui. In Hawaii Hina was hismother. Elsewhere Ina, or Hina,was the grandmother, fromwhom he secured fire.

The Hervey Island legendssay that four mighty ones livedin the old world from which theirancestors came. This old worldbore the name Ava-iki, which isthe same as Hawa-ii, or Hawaii.The four gods were Mauike, Ra,Ru, and Bua-Taranga.

It is interesting to trace theconnection of these four nameswith Polynesian mythology.Mauike is the same as the demi-god of New Zealand, Mafuike. Onother islands the name is spelledMauika, Mafuika, Mafuia,Mafuie, and Mahuika. Ra, thesun god of Egypt, is the same asRa in New Zealand and La (sun)in Hawaii. Ru, the supporter ofthe heavens, is probably the Kuof Hawaii, and the Tu of NewZealand and other islands, oneof the greatest of the gods wor-shiped by the ancient Hawaii-ans. The fourth mighty one from

RReevviissiitteedd

LLeeggeennddss ooff MMaauuii -- MMaauuii''ss HHoommee

Revisited - Legends of Maui - Maui's Home


Ava-ika was a woman, Bua-taranga, who guarded the pathto the underworld. Talanga inSamoa, and Akalana in Hawaiiwere the same as Taranga. Pua-kalana (the Kalana flower) wouldprobably be the same in Hawaii-an as Bua-taranga in the lan-guage of the Society Islands.

Ru, the supporter of theHeavens, married Bua-taranga,the guardian of the lower world.Their one child was Maui. Thelegends of Raro-Tonga state thatMaui’s father and mother werethe children of Tangaroa(Kanaloa in Hawaiian), the greatgod worshiped throughout Poly-nesia. There were three Mauibrothers and one sister, Ina-ika(Ina, the fish).

The New Zealand legends re-late the incidents of the baby-hood of Maui.

Maui was prematurely born,and his mother, not caring to betroubled with him, cut off a lockof her hair, tied it around himand cast him into the sea. Inthis way the name came to him,Maui-Tiki-Tiki, or “Maui formedin the topknot.” The waters borehim safely. The jelly fish en-wrapped and mothered him. Thegod of the seas cared for andprotected him. He was carried tothe god’s house and hung up inthe roof that he might feel thewarm air of the fire, and be cher-ished into life. When he was oldenough, he came to his relations

while they were all gathered inthe great House of Assembly,dancing and making merry.Little Maui crept in and satdown behind his brothers. Soon

his mother called the childrenand found a strange child, whoproved that he was her son, andwas taken in as one of the fam-ily. Some of the brothers werejealous, but the eldest addressedthe others as follows:

“Nevermind; let him be our

dear brother. In the days of

peace remember the proverb,

’When you are on friendly terms,

settle your disputes in a friendly

way; when you are at war, you

must redress your injuries by vi-

olence.’ It is better for us, broth-

ers, to be kind to other people.

These are the ways by which

men gain influence--by laboring

for abundance offood to feed

others, by collecting property to

give to others, and by similar

means by which you promote the

good ofothers.”

Thus, according to the NewZealand story related by SirGeorge Grey, Maui was receivedin his home.

Maui’s home was placed bysome of the Hawaiian myths atKauiki, a foothill of the great ex-tinct crater Haleakala, on the Is-land of Maui. It was here helived when the sky was raised toits present position. Here waslocated the famous fort aroundwhich many battles were foughtduring the years immediatelypreceding the coming of CaptainCook. This fort was held by war-riors of the Island of Hawaii anumber of years. It was fromthis home that Maui was sup-posed to have journeyed when

he climbed Mt. Haleakala to en-snare the sun.

And yet most of the Hawaii-an legends place Maui’s home bythe rugged black lava beds of theWailuku river near Hilo on theisland Hawaii. Here he livedwhen he found the way to makefire by rubbing sticks together,and when he killed Kuna, thegreat eel, and performed otherfeats of valor. He was supposedto cultivate the land on thenorth side of the river. Hismother, usually known as Hina,had her home in a lava cave un-der the beautiful Rainbow Falls,one of the fine scenic attractionsof Hilo. An ancient demigod,wishing to destroy this home,threw a great mass of lavaacross the stream below thefalls. The rising water was fastfilling the cave.

Hina called loudly to herpowerful son Maui. He camequickly and found that a largeand strong ridge of lava layacross the stream. One end res-ted against a small hill. Mauistruck the rock on the other sideof the hill and thus broke a newpathway for the river. The waterswiftly flowed away and the caveremained as the home of theMaui family.

According to the KingKalakaua family legend, trans-lated by Queen Liliuokalani,Maui and his brothers also madethis place their home. Here hearoused the anger of two uncles,his mother’s brothers, who werecalled “Tall Post” and “ShortPost,” because they guarded theentrance to a cave in which theMaui family probably had itshome.

“They fought hard withMaui, and were thrown, and redwater flowed freely from Maui’sforehead. This was the firstshower by Maui.” Perhaps somefamily discipline followed thisknocking down of door posts, forit is said:

Maui was prematurelyborn, and his mother, notcaring to be troubled withhim, cut off a lock ofherhair, tied it around himand cast him into the sea.

Rugged Lava of Wailuku River

Revisted - Legends of Maui - Maui's Home


“They fetched the sacred Awa

bush; Then came the second

shower by Maui; The third

showerwas when the elbow of

Awa was broken; The fourth

shower came with the sacred

bamboo.”

Maui’s mother, so says aNew Zealand legend, had herhome in the under-world as wellas with her children. Maui de-termined to find the hiddendwelling place. His motherwould meet the children in theevening and lie down to sleepwith them and then disappearwith the first appearance ofdawn. Maui remained awake onenight, and when all were asleep,arose quietly and stopped upevery crevice by which a ray oflight could enter. The morningcame and the sun mounted up--far up in the sky. At last hismother leaped up and tore awaythe things which shut out thelight.

”Oh, dear; oh, dear! She sawthe sun high in the heavens; soshe hurried away, crying at thethought of having been so badlytreated by her own children.”

Maui watched her as shepulled up a tuft of grass and dis-appeared in the earth, pullingthe grass back to its place.

Thus Maui found the path tothe under-world. Soon he trans-formed himself into a pigeon andflew down, through the cave, un-

til he saw a party of people un-der a sacred tree, like thosegrowing in the ancient firstHawaii. He flew to the tree andthrew down berries upon thepeople. They threw back stones.At last he permitted a stone fromhis father to strike him, and hefell to the ground. “They ran tocatch him, but lo! the pigeonhad turned into a man.”

Then his father “took him tothe water to be baptized” (pos-sibly a modern addition to thelegend). Prayers were offered andceremonies passed through. Butthe prayers were incomplete andMaui’s father knew that the godswould be angry and causeMaui’s death, and all because inthe hurried baptism a part of theprayers had been left unsaid.Then Maui returned to the upperworld and lived again with hisbrothers.

Maui commenced his mis-chievous life early, for Hervey Is-landers say that one day thechildren were playing a gamedearly loved by Polynesians--hide-and-seek. Here a sisterenters into the game and hideslittle Maui under a pile of drysticks. His brothers could notfind him, and the sister toldthem where to look. The stickswere carefully handled, but thechild could not be found. He hadshrunk himself so small that hewas like an insect under somesticks and leaves. Thus early he

began to use en-chantments.

Maui’s home,at the best, wasonly a sorry affair.Gods and demigodslived in caves andsmall grass houses.The thatch rapidlyrotted and requiredcontinual renewal.In a very short timethe heavy rainsbeat through thedecaying roof. Thehome was without

windows or doors, save as lowopenings in the ends or sides al-lowed entrance to those willingto crawl through. Off on one sidewould be the rude shelter, in theshadow of which Hina poundedthe bark of certain trees intowood pulp and then into stripsof thin, soft wood-paper, whichbore the name of “Tapa cloth.”This cloth Hina prepared for theclothing of Maui and his broth-ers. Tapa cloth was often treatedto a coat of cocoa-nut, or candle-nut oil, making it somewhat wa-terproof and also more durable.

Here Maui lived on edibleroots and fruits and raw fish,knowing little about cooked food,for the art of fire making was notyet known. In later years Mauiwas supposed to live on theeastern end of the island Maui,and also in another home on thelarge island Hawaii, on which hediscovered how to make fire byrubbing dry sticks together.Maui was the Polynesian Mer-cury. As a little fellow he wasendowed with peculiar powers,permitting him to become invis-ible or to change his humanform into that of an animal. Hewas ready to take anything fromany one by craft or force. Never-theless, like the thefts of Mer-cury, his pranks usuallybenefited mankind.

It is a little curious thataround the different homes ofMaui, there is so little record oftemples and priests and altars.He lived too far back for priestlycustoms. His story is the rude,mythical survival of the dayswhen of church and civil gov-ernment there was none andworship of the gods was practic-ally unknown, but every manwas a law unto himself, and alsoto the other man, and quick re-taliation followed any injury re-ceived. PT

Maui’s Hut and Home

TThhee ssttrreeeettss ooff PPaarrlleerreemmoo aarree

nnaammeedd aafftteerr ffaammoouuss wwrriitteerrss

ffoorr tthhee llaanngguuaaggee ooff eeaacchh

qquuaarrtteerr..TThhiiss iiss wwhheerree wwee

ttaakkee aa qquuiicckk llooookk aatt wwhhyy

tthheeyy aarree ffaammoouuss..

WWoorrdd oonn tthhee SSttrreeeettss

MMaallaayy MMaasstteerrss

Word on the Streets - Malay Masters


Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir was a Malayan writer ofIndian origin. The term Munshi means “teacher” or“educator”, which is how his fans and followersthought of him. He had a very strict Muslim up-bringing, and he was a language teacher and in-terpreter who was proficient in Arabic, English,Hindustani, Tamil and Malay. His works and con-tributions to literature earned him the title “TheFather of Modern Malay Literature”.

Abdullah was born in Malacca in 1797. When hewas six, he had a severe attack of dysentery andwas sick most of the time. While his mother tookgreat care of him, he was also taken care of byvarious individuals, as the custom of the Malaycommunity of that period believed that any childwith poor immunity to diseases should be caredfor by those were not his or her biological parents.

Young Abdullah was unable to read the Qur’an.While other children chanted their verses from it,he would trace out the written Arabic characterswith his pen. His strict father became furious athis son’s inabilities and sent him to the KampongPali Koran School when he was only seven yearsold. His father made sure Abdullah did not neglecthis Qur’an studies and made him practice writingvery often, severely punishing him for any mis-takes, until he did the lessons perfectly. Part of hisstudies included writing the complete Qur’an, andtranslating Arabic text into Malay.

When he was eleven, Abdullah began earningmoney by writing Qur’anic texts, and when he was13, he was teaching religion to Muslim soldierswho were stationed at Malaccan Fort. It was therethat he first was given the title “Munshi” by thesoldiers he taught. He continued with his Malaystudies while also learning Hindustani, then wenton to study in Malacca and followed his father’spath as a translator and teacher.

In 1810, Sir Stamford Raffles, a British statesman,arrived in Malacca on the orders of Lord Minto,Governor-General of India. He hired Abdullah, whowas just 15, as an interpreter to communicatewith the native rulers in their language. Abdullahkept a diary of his time working with Raffles,which eventually became part ofHikayat Abdullah(Abdullah’s Story), and is the only eye-witness re-cord of preparations for the British military exped-ition against the Dutch and French in Java,Indonesia in 1811 , although he did not take partin the expedition himself because his mother re-fused to let him go. Hikayat Abdullah is con-sidered to be an autobiography of Abdullah andwas his major literary work, being completed in1845 and first published in 1849. It was one of thefirst Malay literary works to be published commer-cially.

Abdullah was the first Malay author to write in thecolloquial language and not the traditional Malayliterary style, which were often fantasies and le-gends. His writing was filled with realism andmodern, using many Malay idioms and proverbs.For this reason, He is regarded by many to be thefirst Malayan journalist. His works were an inspir-ation to future generations of writers and was anearly stage of the transition from the classical,flowery prose of Malay literature to it’s more mod-ern form.

Abdullah’s other works include Kisah PelayaranAbdullah ke Kelantan (The Tale of Abdullah’s Voy-age to Kelantan), which describes his experienceson a trip from Singapore to Kelantan in 1837, andKisah Pelayaran Abdullah ke Mekah (The Tale ofAbdullah’s Voyage to Mecca), which was publishedposthumously, since Abdullah died in Jeddah in1854 at the age of 58, before reaching Mecca.

Munshi Abdullah1 796 - October 1 854

Jalan Abdullah

Bibliography• 1838 Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah ke Kelantan (The Tale of Abdullah's Voyage to Kelantan)• 1849 Hikayat Abdullah (Abdullah's Story)• 1858 Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah ke Mekah (The Tale of Abdullah's Voyage to Mecca)



Dato’ Haji Shahnon bin Ahmad was born in Sik,Kedah, in 1933. He is a Malaysian author, formerMember of Parliament, and a National Laureate.He has written novels, satires and short stories inMalay. He won the title of Pejuang Sastera (Cham-pion of Literature) in 1976, then the AnugerahSastera Negara (National Laureate Award) in 1982.He even has the honorary title of Dato, which isroughly equivalent to a British knighthood.

Shahnon was born in the village of BanggulDerdap, which is located in Sik in the Malaysianstate of Kedah, in 1933. He went to an Englishsecondary school in Alor Setar until 1953, thentaught English in Kedah and Trengaanu. He spenta year serving as an army officer, then taughtMalay literature and language from 1960 to 1963in Kedah. He went to Australia in 1968 to studyand work in Canberra at the Australian NationalUniversity there, then graduated with a degree inAsian Studies in 1971 .

After returning to Malaysia in 1972, Shahnon wasgiven a position on the staff of Universiti SainsMalaysia (University of Science, Malaysia) in Pen-ang, where he started studying modern Malay po-etry. He went on to get his Master of Arts degreefrom there 1975, then stayed on to teach literatureand serve as the dean of the School of Humanities.

Shahnon wrote several novels from 1965 to 1978,most of them dealing with the social changes oc-curring in his country. Rentong (Rope of Ash), pub-lished in 1965, was about a village headmannamed Pak Senik who tried to make the villagersplant two crops of rice a year. Shahnon liked toplay with the titles of his books. For example, hispolitical novels Menteri (1967) and Perdana (1969),when combined to form Perdana Menteri, or “PrimeMinister”.

During the 1970s, Shahnon joined the Islamicfundamentalist movement called Darul Arqam,which practiced a very strict adherence to an Is-lamic code. He began calling for Malay writers todevelop an authentic Islamic literature in Malay.However, by the late 1980s, he had given it up, ex-pressing his disappointment with religious leaderswho exploit their followers, as he believed washappening with Darul Arqam. He wrote somesatirical novels covering this, including Tok Guru(His Teacher) .

From 1985 to 1996, Shahnon was the head of theIslamic Center of Malaysian Science University.During this time, he wrote a few books, but hismost notable one was Shit @PukiMak @PM, pub-lished in 1999. It was a controversial politicalsatire, making allegorical references to the rulingcoalition government and others, comparing themto feces in the large intestine of a person. Therewere some attempts by the government to ban thisbook and to strip Shahnon of his literary title andawards. He did finally resign from his teaching po-sition at the university.

Shahnon’s novel Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan (No Har-vest but a Thorn, 1996), brought him internationalattention, and it has been translated into manyother languages, including English, French, Rus-sian, Dutch and Japanese. It has also been adap-ted into a film called Rice People. It depicted thehardships of a struggling farming family and theirbelief in the supernatural. Srengenge (The Sun,1973) won him the Hadiah Sastera (Prize for Liter-ary Fighters) in Malaysia with its strong religioustheme.

Shahnon Ahmad1 3 January 1 933 -

Jalan Shahnon Ahmad

Partial Bibliography• 1964 Anjing-anjing (The Dogs)• 1965 Debu merah (Red Dust)• 1965 Terdedah (Exposed)• 1965 Rentong (Rope of Ash)• 1966 Ranjau Sepanjang Jalan (No Harvest but aThorn)• 1967 Protes (Protest)• 1967 Menteri (Minister)• 1969 Perdana (Prime)

• 1973 Srengenge (The Sun)• 1974 Sampah (Garbage)• 1977 Kemelut (Crisis)• 1977 Selasai sudah• 1978 Seluang menolak Baung• 1978 Penglibatan dalam puisi (Involvement in Poetry)• 1979 Gubahan (Arrangement)• 1981 Kesusasteraan dan etika Islam (Literature andIslamic Ethics)• 1985 Al-syiqaq



Usman Awang was a Malaysian author, poet, andplaywright, often labeled as the best poet in theMalay language. Writing since 1955, he producedaround 200 poems, most of them being romanticand beautiful.

Usman was born in 1929 to a poor family in thesmall fishing village of Kuala Sedili in Johor,Malaysia. He had only a primary school educationat the Malay School Kuala Sedili and worked on afarm. When World War II started, he was forced in-to slave labor under Japanese occupancy. Whenthe war was over, he held jobs an office boy, aproof reader and a policeman before becoming ajournalist for Utusan Melayu. He was among thepeople that went on strike to protest the govern-ment's interference with the newspaper afterMalaysia gained independence from Britain. Whenthe government planned to amend the Constitu-tion in 1967, we was also part of those protests,fearing that Malay would lose it’s position as thenational language.

His poetry rose out of his social activism, as ameans of awakening people to the dangers of op-pression by a government. He wrote under manypen names, including Tongkat Warrant (which heused when he worked as a police officer) , Adi Jaya,Amir, Atma Jaya and Rose Murni.

The Reformasimovement in Malaysia was begunsupporters of Anwar Ibrahim after he was firedfrom his position as Deputy Prime Minister in1998. He was jailed in 1998 on the charges of cor-ruption and sodomy, which he claimed he was in-nocent of. Usman was a believer in Anwar’sinnocence and dedicated two poems to him in hisanthology Dari Derita Bangsa (From the People’sAnguish).

Usman won many awards, including the South-east Asian Writer Award in 1982 and the NationalLiterature Award in 1983. He died in November,2001 , after a number of illnesses, at the age of 72.

Usman Awang1 2 July 1 929 - 29 November 2001

Jalan Usman

Partial Bibliography• 2006 Tulang-Tulang Berserakan (Scattered Bones)• 2007 Turunnya Sebuah Bendera (A Revelation of the Flag)• 2009 Jiwa Hamba (Enslaved Soul)• 2009 Sahabatku; Puisi-puisi 5 Bahasa (Companions; 5 English poems)

1988 Tok Guru (His Teacher)• 1988 Tunggul-tunggul Gerigis (Stumps)• 1991 Sastera sebagai seismograf kehidupan(Literature as a Seismograph of Life)• 1992 Ummi dan Abang Syeikhul• 1995 Tivi• 1999 Nurul, anak papa ku• 1999 Shit @ PukiMak @ PM• 2003 Lamunan puitis: sebuah trilogi (Poetic Reverie:A Trilogy)

• 2005 Tonil purbawara• 2006 Perjalananku sejauh ini: sebuah autobiografi(Far Wanderings: An Autobiography)• 2006 Setitis embun semarak api (Dew Drop Flame)• 2007 Mahabbah• 2008 Weltanschauung: Suatu Perjalanan Kreatif(Philosophy of Life: A Creative Journey)

Coming in June

• Get wrapped up in the mystery of the Liber Linteus

• Defend yourself with Pencak Silat

• Learn about some endangered Chibchan languages

• Celebrate the sun during Inti Raymi

Where Are You?


This former capital city was founded around 1820 by European traders and settlers, after which it be-came an important port and trading post. It was the first permanent European settlement in the pacificislands, and attracted coconut and cotton planters as well as merchants who set up shops, hotels andbars. It had a population mainly of traders, shipwrights, and vagabonds, businessmen and missionaries.The town reached a population of over 800 within fifty years. It was annexed to a new nation state in1871, and became the first of many things for that state, such as having the first bank, school, post office,private club, town hall and hospital. The first newspaper of this nation state was established here and isstill in operation today. The city has the oldest hotel still operating in the South Pacific, dating back to the1860s. The oldest Masonic lodge in the South Pacific is also here.

When the nation state of it was annexed by the British in 1874, the city became the capital and remainedso until 1877, when the administration center was moved. This was done mainly because of concerns thatthe 600-meter high cliffs around the city gave it no space for growth.

The city was a port for ships and boats crossing the Pacific until the 1950s. Without the traffic, the cityfaced economic extinction. It was saved when, in 1964, the Pacific Fishing Company (PAFCO) was foun-ded by a Japanese firm which specialized in freezing and shipping canned tuna to markets in Europeand Canada. A cannery was opened on the island in 1976, and it is the largest private employer on the is-land.

Now, the city has a population of over one thousand, with another three thousand living in the outlyingareas. It is the economic center and the largest of 24 settlements on its island. The city’s community centrehas a public library, kindergarten, museum, crafts centre and meeting hall. This centre was formerly astore which was built in 1978 by the Morris Hedstrom & Company trading company. Nearby is a royalwharf, which is now used mostly by local boats. The city has been seeking recognition recognition fromUNESCO as a World Heritage for decades.

Can you name this city and country?

Where Are You?

Last month's answer: Trabzon, Turkey

Revisited - Legends of Maui - Maui Snaring the Sun


RReevviissiitteedd

LLeeggeennddss ooff MMaauuii -- MMaauuii SSnnaarriinngg tthhee SSuunn

[Editor’s note: This article is a reprint

from “Legends of Ma-Ui, a Demi

God of Polynesia and of his Mother

Hina” by W. D. Westervelt. I t was

published in 1 91 0. ]

aui is a demi god. TheMaui story probably con-tains a larger number of

unique and ancient myths thanthat of any other legendary char-acter in the mythology of any na-tion. The Maui legends form oneof the strongest links in themythological chain of evidencewhich binds the scattered inhab-itants of the Pacific into one na-tion.

“Maui became restless andfought the sunWith a noose that he laid.And winter won the sun,And summer was won by Maui.”--Queen Liliuokalani’s familychant.

A very unique legend isfound among the widely-scattered Polynesians. The storyof Maui’s “Snaring the Sun” wastold among the Maoris of NewZealand, the Kanakas of theHervey and Society Islands, andthe ancient natives of Hawaii.The Samoans tell the same storywithout mentioning the name ofMaui. They say that the snarewas cast by a child of the sun it-self.

The Polynesian stories of theorigin of the sun are worthy ofnote before the legend of thechange from short to long daysis given.

The Tongan Islanders, ac-cording to W. W. Gill, tell thestory of the origin of the sun andmoon. They say that Vatea(Wakea) and their ancestor Ton-gaiti quarreled concerning achild--each claiming it as hisown. In the struggle the childwas cut in two. Vatea squeezedand rolled the part he securedinto a ball and threw it away, farup into the heavens, where it be-came the sun. It shone brightlyas it rolled along the heavens,and sank down to Avaiki(Hawaii) , the nether world. Butthe ball came back again andonce more rolled across the sky.Tongaiti had let his half of thechild fall on the ground and liethere, until made envious by thebeautiful ball Vatea made.

At last he took the fleshwhich lay on the ground andmade it into a ball. As the sunsank he threw his ball up intothe darkness, and it rolled alongthe heavens, but the blood haddrained out of the flesh while itlay upon the ground, therefore itcould not become so red andburning as the sun, and had notlife to move so swiftly. It was aswhite as a dead body, becauseits blood was all gone; and itcould not make the darkness

flee away as the sun had done.Thus day and night and the sunand moon always remain withthe earth.

The legends of the SocietyIslands say that a demon in thewest became angry with the sunand in his rage ate it up, causingnight. In the same way a demonfrom the east would devour themoon, but for some reason theseangry ones could not destroytheir captives and were com-pelled to open their mouths andlet the bright balls come forthonce more. In some places asacrifice of some one of distinc-tion was needed to placate thewrath of the devourers and freethe balls of light in times of ec-lipse.

The moon, pale and dead inappearance, moved slowly; whilethe sun, full of life and strength,moved quickly. Thus days werevery short and nights were verylong. Mankind suffered from thefierceness of the heat of the sunand also from its prolonged ab-sence. Day and night were alikea burden to men. The darknesswas so great and lasted so longthat fruits would not ripen.

After Maui had succeeded inthrowing the heavens into theirplace, and fastening them sothat they could not fall, helearned that he had opened away for the sun-god to come upfrom the lower world and rapidlyrun across the blue vault. This

Revisted - Legends of Maui - Maui Snaring the Sun


made two troubles for men--theheat of the sun was very greatand the journey too quickly over.Maui planned to capture the sunand punish him for thinking solittle about the welfare of man-kind.

As Rev. A. O. Forbes, a mis-sionary among the Hawaiians,relates, Maui’s mother wastroubled very much by the heed-less haste of the sun. She hadmany kapa-cloths to make, forthis was the only kind of cloth-ing known in Hawaii, exceptsometimes a woven mat or along grass fringe worn as a skirt.This native cloth was made bypounding the fine bark of certaintrees with wooden mallets untilthe fibres were beaten andground into a wood pulp. Thenshe pounded the pulp into thinsheets from which the bestsleeping mats and clothes couldbe fashioned. These kapa clothshad to be thoroughly dried, butthe days were so short that bythe time she had spread out thekapa the sun had heedlesslyrushed across the sky and gonedown into the under-world, andall the cloth had to be gatheredup again and cared for until an-other day should come. Therewere other troubles. “The food

could not be prepared andcooked in one day. Even an in-cantation to the gods could notbe chanted through ere theywere overtaken by darkness.”

This was very discouragingand caused great suffering, aswell as much unnecessarytrouble and labor. Many com-plaints were made against thethoughtless sun.

Maui pitied his mother anddetermined to make the sun goslower that the days might belong enough to satisfy the needsof men. Therefore, he went overto the northwest of the island onwhich he lived. This was Mt. Iao,an extinct volcano, in which liesone of the most beautiful andpicturesque valleys of theHawaiian Islands. He climbedthe ridges until he could see thecourse of the sun as it passedover the island. He saw that thesun came up the eastern side ofMt. Haleakala. He crossed overthe plain between the two moun-tains and climbed to the top ofMt. Haleakala. There he watchedthe burning sun as it came upfrom Koolau and passed directlyover the top of the mountain.The summit of Haleakala is agreat extinct crater twenty milesin circumference, and nearly

twenty-five hun-dred feet in depth.There are two tre-mendous gaps orchasms in the sideof the crater wall,through which indays gone by themassive bowlpoured forth itsflowing lava. One ofthese was theKoolau, or easterngap, in which Mauiprobably plannedto catch the sun.

Mt. Hale-a-ka-la of the HawaiianIslands meansHouse-of-the-sun.“La,” or “Ra,” is the

name of the sun throughoutparts of Polynesia. Ra was thesun-god of ancient Egypt. Thusthe antiquities of Polynesia andEgypt touch each other, andtoday no man knows the fullreason thereof.

The Hawaiian legend saysMaui was taunted by a man whoridiculed the idea that he couldsnare the sun, saying, “You willnever catch the sun. You areonly an idle nobody.”

Maui replied, “When I con-quer my enemy and my desire isattained, I will be your death.”

After studying the path ofthe sun, Maui returned to hismother and told her that hewould go and cut off the legs ofthe sun so that he could not runso fast.

His mother said: “Are youstrong enough for this work?” Hesaid, “Yes.” Then she gave himfifteen strands of well-twistedfiber and told him to go to hisgrandmother, who lived in thegreat crater of Haleakala, for therest of the things in his conflictwith the sun. She said: “Youmust climb the mountain to theplace where a large wiliwili treeis standing. There you will findthe place where the sun stops toeat cooked bananas prepared byyour grandmother. Stay thereuntil a rooster crows threetimes; then watch your grand-mother go out to make a fire andput on food. You had better takeher bananas. She will look forthem and find you and ask whoyou are. Tell her you belong toHina.”

When she had taught himall these things, he went up themountain to Kaupo to the placeHina had directed. There was alarge wiliwili tree. Here he waitedfor the rooster to crow. Thename of that rooster wasKalauhele-moa. When the roost-er had crowed three times, thegrandmother came out with abunch of bananas to cook forthe sun. She took off the upperIao Mountain From the Sea



part of the bunch and laid itdown. Maui immediatelysnatched it away. In a momentshe turned to pick it up, butcould not find it. She was angryand cried out: “Where are thebananas of the sun?” Then shetook off another part of thebunch, and Maui stole that.Thus he did until all the bunchhad been taken away. She wasalmost blind and could not de-tect him by sight, so she sniffedall around her until she detectedthe smell of a man. She asked:“Who are you? To whom do youbelong?” Maui replied: “I belongto Hina.” “Why have you come?”Maui told her, “I have come tokill the sun. He goes so fast thathe never dries the tapa Hina hasbeaten out.”

The old woman gave a magicstone for a battle axe and onemore rope. She taught him howto catch the sun, saying: “Makea place to hide here by this largewiliwili tree. When the first leg ofthe sun comes up, catch it withyour first rope, and so on untilyou have used all your ropes.Fasten them to the tree, thentake the stone axe to strike thebody of the sun.”

Maui dug a hole among theroots of the tree and concealedhimself. Soon the first ray oflight--the first leg of the sun--came up along the mountainside. Maui threw his rope andcaught it. One by one the legs ofthe sun came over the edge ofthe crater’s rim and werecaught. Only one long leg wasstill hanging down the side ofthe mountain. It was hard forthe sun to move that leg. Itshook and trembled and triedhard to come up. At last it creptover the edge and was caught byMaui with the rope given by hisgrandmother.

When the sun saw that hissixteen long legs were held fastin the ropes, he began to goback down the mountain side in-to the sea. Then Maui tied the

ropes fast to the tree and pulleduntil the body of the sun cameup again. Brave Maui caught hismagic stone club or axe, andbegan to strike and wound thesun, until he cried: “Give me my

life.” Maui said: “If you live, youmay be a traitor. Perhaps I hadbetter kill you.” But the sunbegged for life. After they hadconversed a while, they agreedthat there should be a regularmotion in the journey of the sun.There should be longer days,and yet half the time he might goquickly as in the winter time,but the other half he must moveslowly as in summer. Thus mendwelling on the earth should beblessed.

Another legend says that hemade a lasso and climbed to thesummit of Mt. Haleakala. Hemade ready his lasso, so thatwhen the sun came up themountain side and rose abovehim he could cast the noose andcatch the sun, but he onlysnared one of the sun’s largerrays and broke it off. Again andagain he threw the lasso until hehad broken off all the strongrays of the sun.

Then he shouted exultantly,“Thou art my captive; I will killthee for going so swiftly.”

Then the sun said, “Let melive and thou shalt see me gomore slowly hereafter. Behold,hast thou not broken off all mystrong legs and left me only theweak ones?”

So the agreement was made,and Maui permitted the sun topursue his course, and fromthat day he went more slowly.

Maui returned from his con-flict with the sun and sought forMoemoe, the man who had ri-diculed him. Maui chased thisman around the island from oneside to the other until they hadpassed through Lahaina (one ofthe first mission stations in1828). There on the seashorenear the large black rock of thelegend of Maui lifting the sky hefound Moemoe. Then they leftthe seashore and the contestraged up hill and down untilMaui slew the man and“changed the body into a longrock, which is there to this day,by the side of the road goingpast Black Rock.”

Before the battle with thesun occurred Maui went downinto the underworld, accordingto the New Zealand tradition,and remained a long time withhis relatives. In some way helearned that there was an en-chanted jawbone in the posses-sion of some one of hisancestors, so he waited andwaited, hoping that at last hemight discover it.

After a time he noticed thatpresents of food were being sentaway to some person whom hehad not met.

The Hawaiian legendsays Maui was taunted bya man who ridiculed theidea that he could snarethe sun, saying, "You willnever catch the sun. Youare only an idle nobody."

Maui Snaring the Sun, pen and ink drawingby Arman Manookian, circa 1927, Honolulu

Academy of Arts

Revisted - Legends of Maui - Maui Snaring the Sun


One day he asked the mes-sengers, “Who is it you are tak-ing that present of food to?”

The people answered, “It isfor Muri, your ancestress.”

Then he asked for the food,saying, “I will carry it to her my-self.”

But he took the food awayand hid it. “And this he did formany days,” and the presentsfailed to reach the old woman.

By and by she suspectedmischief, for it did not seem as ifher friends would neglect her solong a time, so she thought shewould catch the tricky one andeat him. She depended upon hersense of smell to detect the onewho had troubled her. As SirGeorge Grey tells the story:“When Maui came along thepath carrying the present offood, the old chiefess sniffed andsniffed until she was sure thatshe smelt some one coming. Shewas very much exasperated, andher stomach began to distend it-self that she might be ready todevour this one when he camenear.

Then she turned toward thesouth and sniffed and not ascent of anything reached her.Then she turned to the north,and to the east, but could not

detect the odor of a human be-ing. She made one more trialand turned toward the west. Ah!then came the scent of a man toher plainly and she called out, ’Iknow, from the smell wafted tome by the breeze, that somebodyis close to me. ’”

Maui made known his pres-ence and the old woman knewthat he was a descendant ofhers, and her stomach beganimmediately to shrink and con-tract itself again.

Then she asked, “Art thouMaui?”

He answered, “Even so,” andtold her that he wanted “the jaw-bone by which great enchant-ments could be wrought.”

Then Muri, the old chiefess,gave him the magic bone and hereturned to his brothers, whowere still living on the earth.

Then Maui said: “Let us nowcatch the sun in a noose that wemay compel him to move moreslowly in order that mankindmay have long days to labor inand procure subsistence forthemselves.”

They replied, “No man canapproach it on account of thefierceness of the heat.”

According to the Society Is-land legend, his mother advised

him to have noth-ing to do with thesun, who was adivine livingcreature, “in formlike a man, pos-sessed of fearfulenergy,” shakinghis golden locksboth morning andevening in theeyes of men. Manypersons had triedto regulate themovements of thesun, but hadfailed completely.

But Maui en-couraged hismother and hisbrothers by ask-

ing them to remember his powerto protect himself by the use ofenchantments.

The Hawaiian legend saysthat Maui himself gathered co-coanut fibre in great quantityand manufactured it into strongropes. But the legends of otherislands say that he had the aidof his brothers, and while work-ing learned many useful lessons.While winding and twisting theydiscovered how to make squareropes and flat ropes as well asthe ordinary round rope. In theSociety Islands, it is said, Mauiand his brothers made sixstrong ropes of great length.These he called aeiariki (royalnooses) .

The New Zealand legendsays that when Maui and hisbrothers had finished making allthe ropes required they tookprovisions and other thingsneeded and journeyed towardthe east to find the place wherethe sun should rise. Maui car-ried with him the magic jaw-bone which he had secured fromMuri, his ancestress, in the un-der-world.

They traveled all night andconcealed themselves by day sothat the sun should not seethem and become too suspiciousand watchful. In this way theyjourneyed, until “at length theyhad gone very far to the east-ward and had come to the veryedge of the place out of whichthe sun rises. There they set towork and built on each side along, high wall of clay, with hutsof boughs of trees at each end tohide themselves in.”

Here they laid a large noosemade from their ropes and Mauiconcealed himself on one side ofthis place along which the sunmust come, while his brothershid on the other side.

Maui seized his magic en-chanted jaw-bone as the weaponwith which to fight the sun, andordered his brothers to pull hardon the noose and not to beHale-a-ka-la Crater. Where the Sun Was Caught



frightened or moved to set thesun free.

“At last the sun came risingup out of his place like a firespreading far and wide over themountains and forests.

He rises up.His head passes through the

noose.The ropes are pulled tight.Then the monster began to

struggle and roll himself about,while the snare jerked back-wards and forwards as hestruggled. Ah! was not he heldfast in the ropes of his enemies.

Then forth rushed that boldhero Maui with his enchantedweapon. The sun screamedaloud and roared. Maui struckhim fiercely with many blows.They held him for a long time. Atlast they let him go, and thenweak from wounds the sun creptvery slowly and feebly along hiscourse.”

In this way the days weremade longer so that men couldperform their daily tasks andfruits and food plants could havetime to grow.

The legend of the Herveygroup of islands says that Mauimade six snares and placedthem at intervals along the pathover which the sun must pass.The sun in the form of a manclimbed up from Avaiki(Hawaiki) . Maui pulled the firstnoose, but it slipped down therising sun until it caught andwas pulled tight around his feet.

Maui ran quickly to pull theropes of the second snare, butthat also slipped down, down,until it was tightened around theknees. Then Maui hastened tothe third snare, while the sunwas trying to rush along on hisjourney. The third snare caughtaround the hips. The fourthsnare fastened itself around thewaist. The fifth slipped underthe arms, and yet the sun spedalong as if but little inconveni-enced by Maui’s efforts.

Then Maui caught the last

noose and threw it around theneck of the sun, and fastenedthe rope to a spur of rock. Thesun struggled until nearlystrangled to death and then gaveup, promising Maui that hewould go as slowly as was de-sired. Maui left the snaresfastened to the sun to keep himin constant fear.“

“These ropes may still beseen hanging from the sun atdawn and stretching into theskies when he descends into theocean at night. By the assistanceof these ropes he is gently letdown into Ava-iki in the evening,and also raised up out of shad-ow-land in the morning.”

Another legend from the So-ciety Islands is related by Mr.Gill:

Maui tried many snares be-fore he could catch the sun. Thesun was the Hercules, or theSamson, of the heavens. Hebroke the strong cords of cocoa-nut fibre which Maui made andplaced around the opening bywhich the sun climbed out fromthe under-world. Maui madestronger ropes, but still the sunbroke them every one.

Then Maui thought of hissister’s hair, the sister Inaika,whom he cruelly treated in lateryears. Her hair was long andbeautiful. He cut off some of itand made a strong rope. Withthis he lassoed or rather snaredthe sun, and caught him aroundthe throat. The sun quicklypromised to be more thoughtfulof the needs of men and go at amore reasonable pace across thesky.

A story from the AmericanIndians is told in Hawaii’s YoungPeople, which is very similar tothe Polynesian legends.

An Indian boy became veryangry with the sun for getting sowarm and making his clothesshrink with the heat. He told hissister to make a snare. The girltook sinews from a large deer,

but they shriveled under theheat. She took her own long hairand made snares, but they wereburned in a moment. Then shetried the fibres of various plantsand was successful. Her brothertook the fibre cord and drew itthrough his lips. It stretched andbecame a strong red cord. Hepulled and it became very long.He went to the place of sunrise,fixed his snare, and caught thesun. When the sun had beensufficiently punished, the anim-als of the earth studied theproblem of setting the sun free.At last a mouse as large as amountain ran and gnawed thered cord. It broke and the sunmoved on, but the poor mousehad been burned and shriveledinto the small mouse of thepresent day.

A Samoan legend says that awoman living for a time with thesun bore a child who had thename “Child of the Sun.” Shewanted gifts for the child’s mar-riage, so she took a long vine,climbed a tree, made the vineinto a noose, lassoed the sun,and made him give her a basketof blessings.

In Fiji, the natives tie thegrasses growing on a hilltop overwhich they are passing, whentraveling from place to place.They do this to make a snare tocatch the sun if he should try togo down before they reach theend of their day’s journey.

This legend is a mistymemory of some time when thePolynesian people were in con-tact with the short days of theextreme north or south. It is avery remarkable exposition of afact of nature perpetuated manycenturies in lands absolutelyfree from such natural phenom-ena. PT

The Parleremo 2013 Calendar is now availableonline! This beautiful calendar is full of imagesfrom countries around the world along withdescriptions oftheir languages.

The countriesinclude Malta,Finland, India,Latvia, Lao andthe languagesinclude Amharic,Xhosa, Kannada,Pashto andPanjabi .

Available in both PDFformat and individualimages suitable for yourcomputer desktopwallpaper!

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Credits


Letter From the EditorWriter: Erik ZidoweckiImages:Petey: Traditional dancer in Ubud

Rongorongo - Island ChantsWriter: Lucil le MartinImages:Rivi: Outer slope of the Rano Raraku volcano (title)christopherhu: closetup Rongorongo tabletRobert Nyman: Easter Island beachDavid Berkowitz: Anakena beach and moaiCarlos Reusser Monsalvez: Rongorongo tablet shaped like fishPetey: Barthel 's tracing of rongorongo tablet G; Mid section of the Santiago Staff; Side of rongorongo Tablet F; Barthel 's tracingof rongorongo Tablet F; Barthel 's tracing of rongorongo text ISources:• "Thomas Barthel" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Barthel>• "Easter Island and Its Mysteries" CHAUVET <http://www.chauvet-translation.com/talking.htm>• "Rongorongo" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo>• "Rongorongo script" Omniglot <http: //www.omniglot.com/writing/rongorongo.htm>• "Rongorongo" novatravels 350 <http: //www.novatravels.350.com/chile/EasterIsland/Rongorongo.htm>

Otto Dempwolff - Islands of LanguageWriter: Sofia OzolsImages:Taro Taylor: Sun, Sea, Sand And Volcano (title)Irmgard Duttge: Otto_DempwolffMerl in Senger: Main building of the University of HamburgPetey: Carl MeinhofSources:• "Otto Dempwolff" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Dempwolff>• "85 Years of Southeast Asian Studies in Hamburg" I IAS Online <http: //www.i ias.nl/i iasn/1 6/regions/sea3.html>• "Otto Dempwolff (1 871 -1 938), Sprachwissenschaftler" www.dempwolff.de <http: //www.dempwolff.de/>

At The Cinema - Whale RiderWriter: Erik ZidoweckiSources:• "Whale Rider" IMDB (Internet Movie Database) <http: //www.imdb.com/title/tt0298228/>• "Whale Rider" From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_Rider>All images are copyright South Pacific Pictures, ApolloMedia, Pandora Filmproduktion

Celebrations - Pasifika FestivalWriter: Sonja KrügerImages:Avenue: Young woman dances on the Tuvalu stageYortw: Hanging Merchandise; Kiribati Banner; Maori Carvings; Some dancers waiting to perform; Stal l Staff; Food Stal l ; Art forSale; Young Dancers; Tapa Cloths for Salekylepost photography: [eternal vision] Some of the dancers during the festival; [dancing women] Women dancing in traditionalcostumeSources:• "History of Pasifika" Pasifika Festival <http: //www.aucklandnz.com/pasifika/history-of-pasifika>• "Pasifika Festival" happywink.org <http: //www.happywink.org/pasifika-festival.html>• "Pasifika Festival" Destination 360 <http: //www.destination360.com/austral ia-south-pacific/new-zealand/pasifika-festival>• "Pasifika Festival" New Zealand.com <http://www.newzealand.com/int/event/pasifika-festival/>• "Pasifika Festivals" Spasifik mag <http: //spasifikmag.com/issue51 pacificfestivals/pasifikafestivals/>• "Pasifika Festival" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasifika_Festival>

Special Feature - AvoiuliWriter: Erik ZidoweckiImages:Phil l ip Capper: Port Vila (title)Andrew Gray: Nakamal in Vanwoki vi l lagePhil l ipC: Image of sand drawing from VanuatuTabisini: Carved stone at LavatmanggemuPetey: Map of VanuatuSources:• "Avoiul i" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoiul i>• "Sand drawing" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_drawing>• "Raga" Omniglot <http: //www.omniglot.com/writing/raga.htm>• "Raga (Hano) language" The Languages of Pentecost Island <http: //www.pentecostisland.net/languages/raga/index.htm>• "Raga language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raga_language>

Credits


• "Vanuatu sand drawings" UNESCO <http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/RL/00073>• "Birth, death, and infinity in sand paintings" davidlansing.com <http://davidlansing.com/birth-death-and-infinity-in-sand-paintings/>• "Vanuatu" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanuatu>

Languages in Peril - The Island InvasionWriter: Lucil le MartinImages:Mbmerino: Ahu Tahai sunset (title)Lufke: Tamure Dancers, Easter IslandMarilyn Sourgose: Kutturan Chamorro PerformersRivi: Panorama of Anakena, Easter IslandPetey: Chamorro people in 1 91 5; Mofmanu Beach, Rotuma; Council of Chiefs of Rotuma, 1 927Sources:• "Rapa Nui language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapa_Nui_language>• "Another mystery of the Rapa Nui culture" Unique-Southamerica-Travel-Experience.com <http://www.unique-southamerica-travel-experience.com/rapa-nui-language.html>• "Rapa Nui people" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapa_Nui_people>• "Easter Island" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island>• "Chamorro people" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamorro_people>• "Rotuman language" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotuman_language>• "Rotuman people" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotuman_people>• "Rotuma" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotuma>

Revisited - Maui's HomeWriter: W. D. WesterveltImages:James Gay Sawkins: Lahaina, West_MauiPetey: Clouds over Maui (title), Rugged Lava of Wailuku RiverSources:• "Maui's Home" Legends of Ma-ui--a demi god of Polynesia, and of his mother Hina W. D. Westervelt, Honolulu: The HawaiianGazette Co. , Ltd. 1 91 0

Word on the Streets - Malay MastersWriter: Sofia OzolsImages:Petey: Pangkor BeachSources:• "Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdullah_bin_Abdul_Kadir>• "Shahnon Ahmad" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnon_Ahmad>• "Usman Awang" Wikipedia <http: //en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usman_Awang>

Where Are You?Writer: Sonja KrügerImages:Merbabu: Mystery picture

Revisited - Maui Snaring the SunWriter: W. D. WesterveltImages:Petey: Sunset in Tahiti (title); Iao Mountain From the Sea; Maui snaring the sun; Hale-a-ka-la Crater. Where the Sun Was CaughtSources:• "Maui Snaring the Sun" Legends of Ma-ui--a demi god of Polynesia, and of his mother Hina W. D. Westervelt, Honolulu: TheHawaiian Gazette Co. , Ltd. 1 91 0

All images are Copyright - CC BY-SA (Creative Commons Share Alike) by their respective owners, except forPetey, which is Public Domain (PD) or unless otherwise noted.

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Parrot Time - Issue 5 - September / October 2013