LANGUAGE
In these monthly discussions we answer one question about language in PNG and beyond. This month we are looking at the life of the late Professor Andrew Pawley and ask what his contributions to PNG linguistics were.
LINGUISTS in PNG have been saddened to learn of the passing in March of Professor Andrew Pawley.
He was a strong promoter of PNG and South Pacific linguistics since before Independence and made many contributions to the country over his decades of association with PNG.
Pawley was instrumental in establishing the Department of Linguistics at the then-new University of PNG in 1969 and continued to mentor PNG linguists and promote the documentation of PNG languages after he returned to his native New Zealand, where he taught at the University of Auckland.
In 1990 he moved to the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, where he taught until about 15 years ago. During these years he often visited PNG and conducted linguistic fieldwork in a number of areas. At his death in Canberra, he was Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at ANU.
He was a fluent speaker of the Kalam language, spoken on the border of Madang and Western Highlands, and compiled a comprehensive dictionary of that language together with the late Ian Same Majnep. Both of them were keenly interested in indigenous biological knowledge and the relationships between that knowledge and indigenous literature and wordings. Because of this, their dictionary included many ethnographic notes and so went beyond being only a list of Kalam words and their English meanings.
Pawley wrote 28 other publications about Kalam, making it one of the best documented languages of the Highlands region. He also wrote extensively about other Highlands languages and mentored a number of PNG and other Pacific students at ANU, including Apoi Yarapea, one of the very few Papua New Guineans to have earned a doctoral degree in linguistics at a foreign university.
Among Prof Pawley’s other research interests were the Austronesian languages of PNG and their relationship to other Austronesian languages in the Pacific, such as Western Fijian and Samoan. He spoke both of these languages and used this knowledge to compile a dictionary of Western Fijian and write an extensive description of Samoan grammar.
By comparing these languages with Austronesian languages in PNG and elsewhere in the Pacific, he was able to show the patterns of migration through the Pacific and the networks that linked different languages and the people who spoke them together.
Working with other colleagues, he helped write the Oceanic Lexicon Project, a mammoth six-volume encyclopedia that used comparisons of words and their meanings in many Oceanic languages to recreate the culture and environment of the prehistoric ancestors of today’s Pacific societies. This has helped Pacific Islanders gain insights into how their ancestors lived thousands of years ago.
Many linguists and students remember how Prof Pawley would go out of his way to assist them. May Huvi, a former linguistics student at UPNG, for example, remembers how he made special arrangements to have copies of a dictionary of the Lakalai (or Nakanai) language delivered to speakers of that language in West New Britain after the anthropologist who had compiled the dictionary died overseas soon after finishing the dictionary.
If he had not done this, it is quite possible that the speakers of that language would not have known that such a dictionary had been finished. They certainly would have found it very difficult to order copies of the dictionary from overseas.
Other persons remember similar acts of kindness, both personal and professional. Some of these memories can be found on a special page of the Linguistic Society of PNG website (www.langlxmelanesia.com), where people can leave memories of Professor Pawley.
- Craig Volker, a linguist living in New Ireland, is an adjunct professor at The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, a member of the Jawun Research Institute at CQ University in Australia, and a visiting professor at the Beijing Foreign Studies University. You can continue this discussion on the Language Toktok Facebook page.
