Tanema

1. The language

2. The Tanema corpus

2.1 Fieldwork

The linguist Alexandre François visited Vanikoro twice, both times as part of a multidisciplinary project.

In 2005, the expedition Lapérouse 2005 brought a hundred participants on a quest to search for the remains of the French navigator Jean François de Lapérouse, whose two ships were destroyed in 1788 on the shores of Vanikoro. While underwater archaeologists were diving for actual remains from the shipwrecks, François walked the island, learning its languages, and recording stories about the French navigators who first visited Vanikoro.

François came back in 2012, as part of a scientific expedition by geologists, who were exploring the impact of sea level rise and of seismic activity on Vanikoro. On that occasion, the linguist made more recordings of the island’s two dying languages, Lovono and Tanema.

2.2 The corpus

The Tanema archive includes six narratives from the oral tradition of Vanikoro.

Due to the main topic of the 2005 expedition, four of the stories recorded revolve around the fate of the 1788 Lapérouse expedition. Thus †Emele Mamuli [picture], an old woman who was fluent in the three languages of the island, told a brief version of the story of Lapérouse (in Tanema, Toñaki ake Laperus “the ship of Lapérouse”). She explained how the two ships were magically destroyed by the Gods of the island.

Among other stories (not translated yet), The Heron tells about a marriage between a man and a heron woman. Yet the man will be treat her so unfairly, that she will finally commit suicide by jumping into the fire. (This plot is reminiscent of Roman’mangan, a story from northern Vanuatu.)

3. Notes on the language

3.1 Orthography

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

{ a  b  bw  d  e  g  i  j  k  l  m  mw  n  ng  ñ  o  p  pw  r  s  t  u  v  w }.

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

The phoneme inventory of Tanema includes 19 phonemic consonants. Table 1 lists the phonemes themselves (using IPA); the orthographic convention is shown in brackets. For example, the letter ‹ j › in the orthography encodes the prenasalized palatal stop /ᶮɟ/ – e.g. majaia [maᶮɟaja] ‘new’.

Table 1 – The 19 phonemic consonants of Tanema

• The phoneme /v/ can surface as voiced [v], but also as voiceless [f], especially word-initially: e.g. ava [ava] ‘four’, but veila [feila] ‘tree’.
• There is no phonemic palatal glide y [j]: it only exists as an allophone of /i/ before another vowel: e.g. niava [ni.a.va] ~ [nja.va] ‘fire’.

Tanema has five vowels, all short.

Table 2 – The five vowels of Tanema

Tanema words are included in my online Teanu–English dictionary, with equivalents in Lovono and Tanema: visit it here.

3.2 Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Tanema distinguish three numbers: singular, dual, plural. Free pronouns can serve as subject, object of transitive verbs, object of prepositions. In addition, all verbs require a subject prefix, which distinguishes realis vs. irrealis mood.

Table 4 – Pronominal forms in Tanema

“Where are y'all coming from? – We were in our garden, we were planting yams.”

4. Useful references

François, Alexandre. 2005. A toponymic map of Vanikoro. Electronic publication. Paris: CNRS. 

François, Alexandre. 2008. Mystère des langues, magie des légendes. In Le mystère Lapérouse ou le rêve inachevé d’un roi, édité par l'Association Salomon. Paris: de Conti, Musée national de la Marine. 230‑233.

François, Alexandre. 2009. The languages of Vanikoro: Three lexicons and one grammar. In Bethwyn Evans (ed). Discovering history through language: Papers in honour of Malcolm Ross. Pacific Linguistics 605. Canberra: Australian National University. 103-126.

François, Alexandre. 2014. Person syncretism and impersonal reference in Vanikoro languages. Paper read at Syntax of the World's Languages (SWL6), Università di Pavia. 

François, Alexandre. 2021. Online Teanu–English dictionary, with equivalents in Lovono and Tanema. Electronic publication. Paris: CNRS  [https://tiny.cc/Vanikoro-dict].

Gaimard, Joseph. 1834. Vocabulaires des idiomes des habitans de Vanikoro. In Jules Dumont d'Urville (ed.). Voyage de découvertes de l'Astrolabe, exécuté par ordre du Roi, pendant les années 1826-1827-1828-1829, sous le commandement de M. J. Dumont d'Urville, Capitaine de vaisseau — Philologie 1, 165–174. Paris: Ministère de la Marine.

Tryon, Darrell. 1994. Language contact and contact-induced language change in the Eastern Outer Islands, Solomon Islands. In Tom Dutton & Darrell Tryon (eds.), Language Contact and Change in the Austronesian World, 611–648. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

More information on Vanikoro languages: https://tiny.cc/Vanikoro-lgs.

Here is how you can cite the present archive:

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