[Papuanlanguages] 'Eating water' and elsewhere: a summary

[Ken_McElhanon at gial.edu]

Hello Martin,

What I tried to do was to reply to  a request by Aikhenvald, but my 
message (pasted below) was rejected with the following note:

You are not allowed to post to this mailing list, and your message has
been automatically rejected.  If you think that your messages are
being rejected in error, contact the mailing list owner at
papuanlanguages-owner at anu.edu.au.

I would like the privilege to respond to such enquiries.  I followed the 
link you provided to the archive for Papuan Languages but couldn't do much 
there to meet my need. If you do not know of me or my work, you will find 
a number of my articles and monographs in the Pacific Linguistics series 
(1970s in particular). I was graduated with a Ph.D. with Wurm and Laycock 
as my mentors (1970) and served as a Research Fellow in Linguistics, 
RSPACS from 1975-78. I plan to return to Papuan linguistics and work 
toward reconstructing proto-Huon Peninsula once I have completed my 
current work in cognitive semantics. 

Thank you,

Ken


----- Forwarded by Ken McElhanon/SILSchools/WCT on 09/12/2006 09:30 PM 
-----

Ken McElhanon/SILSchools/WCT
09/12/2006 09:57 AM


To

"Alexandra Aikhenvald" <A.Aikhenvald at latrobe.edu.au>
cc
Darja Hoenigman <darja.hoenigman at gmail.com>, Jingyi 
<dujy03 at mails.tsinghua.edu.cn>, Kenneth M Sumbuk 
<Kenneth.Sumbuk at upng.ac.pg>, papuanlanguages at anu.edu.au, 
papuanlanguages-bounces at anu.edu.au, Renée Lambert-Brétière 
<Renee.Lambert at univ-lyon2.fr>, Ross Bowden <R.Bowden at latrobe.edu.au>, Rene 
van den Berg <r.vandenberg at sil.org.pg>, Sheena van der Mark 
<S.vanderMark at latrobe.edu.au>, Tonya Stebbins <T.Stebbins at latrobe.edu.au>




Subject
Re: [Papuanlanguages] 'Eating water' and elsewhere: a summary





Dear colleagues,

Alexandra's original request concerned a word list by SIL member Al 
Freudenberg dated 1975. The material is quoted below.


What struck me in a word list of Boikin (Yengoru dialect), compiled by
A. Freudenburg (1975; SIL archives), was a Tok Pisin equivalent of the
English verb 'drink': this was given as kaikaim wara.

Does it make any sense to any of you? Have you ever heard this used?

I would have responded earlier but for a couple reasons, one of which was 
that I was just finishing a summer teaching in South Korea and had very 
many loose ends to attend to after my return to the US in late August. 

The linguistic scene in PNG in the 1970s was still one of surveying the 
country to account for all the languages. Some of you may recall Prof. 
Stephen Wurm's (ANU) multiple publications during that time of the ever 
changing linguistic picture in PNG. I published a paper in Anthropos (1971. "Classifying New Guinea Languages." Anthropos 66:120-144.) detailing the wide variation in then current survey methods with the 
conclusion that no two researchers, given the same data,  would have had 
much agreement in their classifications.  Don Laycock, who was my Ph.D. 
supervisor at that time, suggested I title the paper "Lexicostatistics So 
What!", playing on Hymes well known  "Lexicostatistics So Far."

The dominant word list used was Swadesh 100. One of the problems in using 
this list in Papuan languages is the large number of 'doublets'--that is, 
two distinct English lexical units that were expressed by a single lexical 
unit in most Papuan languages. For my work in the Morobe Province, I found 
only 87 of the 100 useful. One of the doublets consists of 'eat' and 
'drink'. As many of you have pointed out, Papuan languages typically have 
one morpheme to cover both of these concepts, as well as those of 'to 
smoke' and 'to chew betel nut'. It basically means 'to take in through the 
mouth'. 

I suggest that when carrying out a language survey, Freudenberg's 
perspective was that he ought to retain the full Swadesh 100  list , so he 
 differentiated the doublet by glossing 'drink' as kaikaim wara. I assume that he used this as the marked form of kaikai and left the unmarked form to cover 'to eat'.  I doubt that he would have 
used kai kaim  kaikai for 'to eat'. 

Hope this is helpful,

Ken McElhanon