Nume

The round island of Gaua is dominated by its central volcano, known in English as Mount Gharat (Garet in Nume), and by the lake that has formed in its caldera (lake Letas in English, Le Tes in Nume).
Gaua is home to two dozen villages or hamlets, scattered around its circular coast. The six languages spoken there form a dialect chain (Kalyan & François 2018) that can be cited clock­­wise, as Nume – Mwerlap – Dorig – Koro – Olrat – Lakon.
Nume is the language spoken in Gaua’s north­east­ern corner – around the island’s airfield, in the villages of Namasari, Lebot, Tarasag. The word Nume is also the name of a former village, in the same area. The language is also sometimes named Tarasag, or Gog.

 

 

2. The Nume recordings

Alexandre François met Nume speakers in August 2003, as part of his linguistic survey of Gaua. Thanks to a specially designed questionnaire (François 2019), he quickly acquired the essentials of the language – enough to understand its basic grammar and lexicon, and also to collect some of the traditional oral literature.

This Nume archive feature a handful of stories – known locally as kekkeom. They include trickster stories around the popular character “Wenawon” – as this short story, narrated by Bresli.

 

3. The Nume language

3.1.  Phonology, orthography

The orthography proposed for transcribing the Nume texts follows this alphabetical order:

{ a b d e ē g i k l m m̄ n n̄ o ō q r s t u v w }.

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

Nume has 15 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​͡pʷ/.

Table 1 – The 15 phonemic consonants of Nume

	labiovelar	bilabial	alveolar	velar
voiceless stop	k​͡pʷ  ‹q›		t  ‹t›	k  ‹k›
prenasalized stop		ᵐb ‹b›	ⁿd  ‹d›
fricative		β [β,ɸ] ‹v›	s  ‹s›	ɣ  ‹g›
nasal	ŋ​͡m​ʷ ‹m̄›	m  ‹m›	n  ‹n›	ŋ  ‹n̄›
lateral			l  ‹l›
rhotic			r  ‹r›
approximant	w  ‹w›

 

Nume has 7 phonemic vowels (François 2005):

Table 2 – The 7 vowels of Nume

	front	back
close	i  ‹i›	u  ‹u›
near-close	ɪ  ‹ē›	ʊ  ‹ō›
open-mid	ɛ  ‹e›	ɔ  ‹o›
open	a  ‹a›

 

François published an ABC-book in Nume, in mono­lingual format, meant to endow younger generations with basic literacy materials in their native language: “Manmanes ta Nume – Our language Nume” (François & François 2011).

3.2.  Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Nume (François 2016) distinguish four numbers: singular, dual, trial, plural. They also strictly encode the contrast between ‘inclusive we’ [=you & me & others] and ‘exclusive we’ [me & others]. Thus the pronoun duru “1inclusive: dual” means ‘you & me’, whereas kamar “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, objects of verbs, objects of prepositions.

Table 3 – The free personal pronouns of Nume

	singular	dual	trial	plural
1 inclusive		duru	dōtōl	gin
1 exclusive	na	kamar	kamatōl	kama
2	nik	kumur	kōmtōl	kimi
3	ni	ruru	rōtōl	nir

 

(1)	Na	vi‑	gil	nik,	wat	nik	veta	gil	mi	na.
	1sg	stat	know	2sg	but	2sg	neg₁	know	neg₂	1sg
	‘I know you, but you don't know me.’

 

(2)	Ruru	qar	togtog	vaten	kama.
	3du	fut	stay:redup	with	1exc:pl
	‘They (two) will stay with us.’

 

4. Useful references

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

François, Alexandre. 2005. Unraveling the history of the vowels of seventeen northern Vanuatu languages. Oceanic Linguistics 44 (2): 443-504. Dec 2005. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i.

— 2012. The dynamics of linguistic diversity: Egalitarian multilingualism and power imbalance among northern Vanuatu languages. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 214, 85–110.

— 2016. The historical morphology of personal pronouns in northern Vanuatu. Faits de Langues. Bern: Peter Lang. 25–60.

François, Alexandre & Sawako François. 2011. Manmanes ta Nume – Our language Nume. Monolingual in Nume. Illustrated by Sawako François. Port-Vila: Alliance Française. 32 pp.

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. 2022. Archive of audio recordings in the Nume language. Pangloss Collection. Paris: CNRS.