Teanu

1. The language

2. The Teanu corpus

2.1 Fieldwork

The island of Vanikoro is difficult to access, due to the absence of an airstrip. The only flights from the capital reach Lata, the provincial capital on Santa Cruz island; from there, one must wait for a ship to reach Vanikoro. People are frequently lost at sea.

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.

Altogether, François spent 29 days working on Teanu, whether on the language itself or on its oral literature and music.

2.2 The corpus

The Teanu archive includes 51 recordings of various genres: songs and music; conversations; narratives… Spoken recordings fall into three sets :

• a couple of informal conversations in the language
• 16 narratives or discussions revolving around the fate of the 1788 Lapérouse expedition
• 27 narratives from the oral tradition of Vanikoro.

The notes below focus on the stories that are here provided with a transcription and/or translation.

2.2.1 Two stories about Lapérouse

Two stories told by Chief Thomas (†2009) revolve around the historical figure of the late Lapérouse – or rather, what became of him in the local folklore. “The message left by Lapérouse” and “The chest left by Lapérouse” are short anecdotes about the early navigator, seen from the islanders’ point of view.

2.2.2 Pushing the canoe to the sea

In this story, Mofet Bwana explains how large canoes, once they’re cut from large trees up in the bush, are dragged from the mountain all the way down to the coast. A sorcerer plays his magic to make the canoe lighter, and men sing songs to cheer themselves up, till the canoe reaches the shore.

2.2.3 The island of the Dancing Spirits

The story of the Dancing spirits, told by Chief James Cook Pae (†2014), tells us about the origin of the “Tamate” spirits, who regularly visit the island of Vanikoro to dance in public [see photo]. (See another presentation of this myth here.)

Once upon a time, a couple from Vanikoro got lost at sea, and finally landed somewhere in northern Vanuatu. That mysterious island was not settled by humans, but by beautiful creatures called Tamate. (The word Tamate is common in north Vanuatu to refer to “ghosts”, “spirits” and “dancing masks”.) The couple was so enthralled by their dance, that they asked to bring back some Tamate creatures with them back to Vanikoro.

2.2.4 Mwasu and the forbidden woman

The same storyteller, Chief James Cook Pae, told us the myth of Mwasu. This story explains how Pakare – a village on the west coast of Vanikoro – was entirely devastated.

Once upon a time, the community of Pakare organised a dancing festival on two offshore islets; almost everyone left the mainland to spend weeks there. Only two people remained in Pakare: one young man called Mwasu; and in another part of the village, a woman who had just given birth. As Mwasu was picking apples, he saw that woman, and fell in love. The problem is, they were cross-cousins (leka), and any relation between them is taboo. Mwasu asked his cousin to come with him, but she refused – no matter how much he insisted: she was terrified of what their relatives would say. But Mwasu’s urge was so strong, that he finally decided to slaughter the whole community. By throwing two heavy stones, he destroyed the two islets, and wiped out the entire population of Pakare. Finally, the woman accepted to follow him.

2.2.5 The kauri tree

This story is the myth of origin of the kauri tree (Agathis macrophylla) – the most valuable tree species of Vanikoro.

A couple was living in Lovono, a village in the north of Vanikoro. The woman was pregnant, but instead of a child, she gave birth to a strange thing: a sort of stone or pinecone. Surprised, she decided to plant it in the ground. Some time later, a plant grew out of that thing – and became a large tree, which they had never seen. When that tree yielded its own fruit, the couple planted it around the whole island. This is how Vanikoro ended up covered with kauri trees.

3. Notes on the language

3.1 Orthography

The orthography proposed for transcribing the Teanu 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 Teanu 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. vijele [fiᶮɟele] ‘bottle’.

Table 1 – The 19 phonemic consonants of Teanu

• The phoneme /v/ can surface as voiced [v], but also as voiceless [f], especially word-initially: e.g. vao [fao] ‘pig’; ive [ive] ~ [ife] ‘why’.
• There is no phonemic palatal glide y [j]: it only exists as an allophone of /i/ before another vowel: e.g. iebe [ieᵐbe] ~ [jeᵐbe] ‘broom’.

Teanu has five vowels, all short.

Table 2 – The five vowels of Teanu

Teanu shows a preference for open syllables CV, and all words end in a vowel. However, consonant clusters are sometimes found word-internally (resulting historically from the syncope of a high vowel /i/ or /u/):

Table 3 – A sample of Teanu words, with or without consonant clusters

Feel free to visit the online dictionary of Teanu.

3.2 Pronominal indexing

The personal pronouns of Teanu 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 Teanu

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].

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.

Tryon, Darrell. 2002. Buma. In John Lynch, Malcolm Ross & Terry Crowley (eds), The Oceanic languages (Curzon Language Family Series 1), 573–586. London: Curzon.

For more on the languages of the region, visit https://tiny.cc/Vanikoro-lgs.

Here is how you can cite the present archive:

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