Even Hovdhaugen

Åshild Næss

Ingjerd Hoëm

With a Pileni-English Vocabulary and an English-Pileni Finderlist

Pileni Texts

The series builds an extensive collection of high quality descriptions of languages around the world. Each volume offers a comprehensive grammatical description of a single language together with fully analyzed sample texts and, if appropriate, a word list and other relevant information which is available on the language in question. There are no restrictions as to language family or area, and although special attention is paid to hitherto undescribed languages, new and valuable treatments of better known languages are also included. No theoretical model is imposed on the authors; the only criterion is a high standard of scientific quality.

A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako

Vaeakau-Taumako, also known as Pileni, is a Polynesian Outlier language spoken in the Reef and Duff Islands in the Solomon Islands' Temotu Province. This is an area of great linguistic diversity and long-standing language contact which has had far-reaching effects on the linguistic situation. Historically, speakers of Vaeakau-Taumako were shipbuilders and navigators who made trade voyages throughout the area, bringing them into constant contact with speakers of the Reefs-Santa Cruz, Utupua and Vanikoro languages. The latter languages are only distantly related to Vaeakau-Taumako, making up an only recently identified first-order subgroup of Oceanic. Polynesian speakers first arrived in the area some 700-1000 years ago from the core Polynesian areas to the east. While today most intra-group communication takes place in Solomon Islands Pijin, traditionally the situation was one of extensive multilingualism, and this has left profound traces in the grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako, which shows a number of structural properties not known from other Polynesian languages. A Grammar of Vaeakau-Taumako is the most comprehensive grammar of any Polynesian Outlier to date, and the first full-length grammar of any language of Temotu Province. Based on extensive fieldwork, it is structured as a reference grammar dealing with all aspects of language structure, from phonology to discourse organization, and including a selection of glossed texts. It will be of interest to typologists, Oceanic linguists, and researchers interested in language contact. ﻿“/P>

Otto Zwartjes

When the first European missionaries arrived on other continents, it was decided that the indigenous languages would be used as the means of christianization. There emerged the need to produce grammars and dictionaries of those languages. The study of this linguistic material has so far not received sufficient attention in the field of linguistic historiography. This volume is the first published collection of papers on missionary linguistics world-wide; it represents the insights of recent research, containing an introduction and papers on methodology, meta-historiography, the historical and cultural background. The book contains studies about early-modern linguistic works written in Spanish, Portuguese, English and French, describing among others indigenous languages from North America and Australia, Maya, Quechua, Xhosa, Japanese, Kapampangan, and Visaya. Topics dealt with include: innovations of individual missionaries in lexicography, grammatical analysis, phonology, morphology, or syntax; creativity in descriptive techniques; differences and/or similarities of works from different continents, and different religious backgrounds (Catholic or Protestant).

Even Hovdhaugen

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