A Melanesian Perspective On Mechanisms Of Language Maintenance And Shift

This is a National Foreign Language Resource Center conference volume and special issue of Language Documentation and Conservation, an open-access journal (http: //nflrc.hawaii.edu/ldc/).

Excerpt from The Melanesian Languages I have endeavoured in the following pages to carry on the work of Bishop Patteson. lie brought to the philological study of the Melanesian languages an extraordinary linguistic faculty,which enabled him to use very many of them with ease, but he left little behind him in print or in manuscript. In the year 1864 ho printed privately some outline grammars or grammatical notes, and in 1866 phrase-books, and Vocabularies of Mahaga, Bauro, and Sesake, which have furnished material for the Melanesischen Sprachen of Von der Gabelentz. In the latter year also phrase-books were printed in some of the languages of the Banks' Islands. I have not taken these as the foundation for my own work. I never had the advantage of studying them with Bishop Patteson, and I know that he considered them imperfect and tentative. It seemed better to work independently on materials obtained directly from natives of Melanesia, and afterwards to compare my conclusions with those of the Bishop where the subjects were the same. Bishop Patteson, therefore, is not answerable for the general views concerning the Melanesian languages here put forward, nor for the structure and arrangement of the Grammars; but I can never forget that I owe any knowledge of these languages that I may possess to the impulse towards the study of them and to the direction which I received from him in the first instance; and I desire to make all that I have been able to do a memorial of gratitude and affection to him. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.