From Sonsorol to Truk: a Dialect Chain
Quackenbush, Edward Miller (1968). From Sonsorol to Truk: a Dialect Chain (Thesis). University of Michigan.
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Abstract: Most of the sixty-odd small islands and atolls from Truk westward in the Central and West Caroline Islands have languages about which little else has been known excepting that they are closely related with Trukese. This study is a linguistic survey of the area, intended to determine how many different languages there are, where their boundaries are located, and what kind of relationships exist among them. Linguistic information was elicited directly from informants from each of seventeen locations selected as representative. The questionnaire consisted of the 200 word Swadesh list for lexicostatistics and nearly 400 more items from general and cultural vocabulary. While differing greatly on the phonetic level, the languages were found to have highly comparable phonological structures with clear and regular patterns of sound correspondence in cognate vocabulary, especially in the consonants. The isoglosses drawn on this basis tend to be lines which run straight north and south at scattered intervals rather than in bundles. Each of the dialect areas thus delimited shares sets of features with the other such areas to it$ east which are different from the sets which it shares with the dialects to its west; thus each distinct dialect area can be viewed as a transition zone between the dialects on either side of it. A comparison of the basic vocabularies of the various dialects discloses a comparable patterning: languages which are close together geographically have higher percentages of cognate vocabulary and those which are separated by larger expanses of ocean have smaller percentages. The islands are connected by a chain of percentages of seventy-eight or higher. Analysis of exclusively-shared lexical items gives results which conform closely to the other findings. The conclusion to be drawn from the linguistic data is that these islands form an exceptionally well-defined example of a dialect chain, and this conclusion is strongly supported by non-linguistic, anecdotal, data. An appendix contains the complete set of word lists used in the analysis.
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MAG: 2595595537 CorpusID: 164235761 OpenAlex: W2595595537
