Lo-Toga

1. The language

2. The Lo-Toga corpus

The Torres islands can be accessed through weekly flights to Lo. Other islands can then be reached by engine boats: Hiw or Tegua to the north, Toga to the south. Alexandre François made several field trips there between 2004 and 2011.

The Lo-Toga archive includes recordings of various genres: songs (lullabies, guitar songs, newēt dances, etc.), narratives, conversations… As far as this corpus is concerned, the most prolific storytellers included:

• (Lo dialect):  Aisak Rongroriw, Peretin Wokmagëne, Pita Woteqō
• (Toga dialect):  Ben Rana, Elton Gëgeliqe, Eron Jefri Muglol, Sesil Pilageliqe

Many stories are centred around a protagonist: Merawehih [mərawəˈhih] the regional hero; but also Morënwe, Tëgohn̄wel, Verënlawe, Delin̄evuv, Wutrimët, Tërvige… They are stories of evil Ogres, tricksters, heroes smart and brave…

Recordings also include conversations about various cultural topics:

• rituals of initiation, and grade-taking ceremonies (huqe)
• the powers of shamans (temëtrong);
• the supernatural forces of sacred stones (ne dule)
• the value of ritual headdresses (ne qegar);
• the art of sorcery
• the history of traditional songs

A dozen texts are provided with a transcription in the original language – though no translation for the time being.

An online dictionary of Lo-Toga is currently under preparation.

3. Notes on the language

3.1 Orthography

The orthography proposed for transcribing Lo-Toga texts follows this alphabetical order:

{a d e ë ē g h i k l m n n̄ n̄w o ō p q r s t u v w }.

Each of these letters corresponds to one phoneme in the language.

Lo-Toga has 16 phonemic consonants. The following chart lists the phonemes themselves (using IPA); the orthographic convention is shown in brackets. For example, the letter ‹q› in the orthography encodes the labiovelar stop [k​ʷ]. The letter ‹d› encodes the “voiceless retroflex plosive” [ʈ]; it is sometimes realized as an affricate [ʈᶳ] – e.g. den̄wē [ʈəŋʷe] ~ [ʈᶳəŋʷe] ‘today’.

Table 1 – The 16 phonemic consonants of Lo-Toga

The Lo dialect of Lo-Toga has 13 vowel phonemes: these include 8 monophthongs /i e ɛ a ə ɔ o ʉ/, and five diphthongs.

Table 2 – The 13 vowel phonemes of Lo-Toga  (Lo dialect)

The Toga dialect shows slightly different diphthongs. For example, dōome [ʈᶳo​͡ɔmə] ‘thought’ in the Lo dialect corresponds to diome [ʈᶳi​͡ɔmə] in Toga; such a correspondence {^(Lo) [o​͡ɔ] = ^(Tg) [i​͡ɔ]} is regular.

The following examples illustrate the language’s orthography:

3.2 Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Lo-Toga distinguish three numbers: singular, dual, plural. They also strictly encode the contrast between ‘inclusive we’ [=you & me & others] and ‘exclusive we’ [me & others]. Thus the pronoun dōr “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas kemor “1exclusive: dual” will read as ‘one person (other than you) + myself’, i.e. ‘me & him/her’.

The free pronouns listed in the next table, can serve as subjects of verbs, or objects of certain prepositions.  Two of these pronouns, namely 1sg and 1incl:pl, serve as shibboleths to distinguish the two dialects Lo and Toga.

Table 4 – The free personal pronouns of Lo-Toga

The pronouns of Lo-Toga are presented in François (2010, 2016). The grammar of verbal number is detailed in François (2019).

4. Useful references

For more on the languages of Northern Vanuatu, visit http://alex.francois.online.fr. The following selected publications help understand Lo-Toga in its context:

François, Alexandre. 2010. Pragmatic demotion and clause dependency: On two atypical subordinating strategies in Lo-Toga and Hiw (Torres, Vanuatu). In I. Bril (ed.), Clause hierarchy and Clause linking: The Syntax and Pragmatics interface. Studies in Language Companion Series 121, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 499–548.

François, Alexandre. 2011. Social ecology and language history in the northern Vanuatu linkage: A tale of divergence and convergence. Journal of Historical Linguistics 1 (2). 175-246.

François, Alexandre. 2016. The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu. In Konstantin Pozdniakov (ed.), Comparatisme et reconstruction : Tendances actuelles. Faits de Langues 47. Bern: Peter Lang. 25–60.

François, Alexandre. 2019. Verbal number in Lo–Toga and Hiw: The emergence of a lexical paradigm. Transactions of the Philological Society 117 (3): 338–371.

Kalyan, Siva & Alexandre François. 2018. Freeing the Comparative Method from the tree model: A framework for Historical Glottometry. In R. Kikusawa & L. Reid (eds), Let's talk about trees: Genetic Relationships of Languages and Their Phylogenic Representation (Senri Ethnological Studies, 98). Ōsaka: National Museum of Ethnology. 59–89. 

Here is how you can cite the present archive:

François, Alexandre. 2021. Archive of audio recordings in the Lo–Toga language. Pangloss collection. Paris: CNRS.