[Mihalic] contribution and questions

[David & Dorothy Counts]

Mihalic list notes

Tok Pisin changes noted in Kaliai West New Britain 2003

Sibling and other kinship terminology: 

A) There is a shift in the reference of /brata/ and /sisa/ terms towards English usage: that is, with the gender of the referent determining the term regardless of the gender of the speaker (/brata/ = male sibling; /sisa/ = female sibling). Older people often use the original TP reference system terms (eg. woman speaking /brata/ is female sibling; /sisa/ a male sibling, etc.). So, in order to avoid confusion when talking to or about women we found we had to ask if they meant /brata man/ or /brata meri/ or /sisa man/, /sisa meri/. 

B)We also heard /anti/ and /ankal/ to refer to the siblings of one's parents. These changes have not affected the local vernacular (Lusi-Kaliai).

C) For many people (especially those under about 45) the term /kasin brata/ has replaced /bisnis/ ("distant kinsman"), /brata/, or /sisa/ ("parellel cousin")and /kandere/ "cross cousin, maternal relative"). It seems not to refer to the gender of any of the relatives. For example: Datima (F) and Walasi (M) (parellel cousins - children of male siblings) refer to each other as /kasin brata/

Other changes noted (this is for starters, more to come!):

The new utterance/change of topic markers /orait/, and /em nau/ are being used interchangeably with /oke/ "Okay", and /so/ "So"; and /long/ and has been replaced for most people by /lon/ and is being written (on notices in the health centres, for example) as "lo."



There will be more to come, as we are just starting to go through the materials we collected in rural Kaliai in the May-July period this year. After an eighteen year absence from the area we felt like really old fashioned country bumpkins speaking our antiquated TP!

A question for general discussion:  The person whose narrative I am currently transcribing has a little English, but truly not much. He is villager who has not worked outside the rural area and has thus had little exposure to native english speakers. Yet his account is liberally sprinkled with incursions from English  with respect both to phonology and vocabulary. For example /naif/ "knife", whereas before we would have heard only /naip/ with the 'traditional TP /f/ -> /p/ shift. So, is he now speaking a "new" TP word, or is he inserting a term from English into his TP narrative? Have you agreed on criterion for judging when a term has been borrowed into TP and when it is simply an insertion from the speakers' other language(s)? When I was doing my thesis on Lusi-Kaliai (back in the dark ages), I arbitrarily decided that if a TP term was inflected gramatically as a lusi term or if it was shifted phonologically, then I would regard it as a fully borrowed item and thus count it as lusi.  Help would be appreciated

David and Dorothy Counts
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