Yonggom Wambon, a Dumut language of West Papua: Annotated Texts with Grammar and Vocabulary
Date
Authors
van den Heuvel, Wilco
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ANU Press
Access Statement
Open Access via publisher website
Abstract
Description
In this book, the author, Wilco van den Heuvel, intends to make Drabbe’s 1959 description of (Yonggom) Wambon available to a wider scientific public. As such, the book is in line with an earlier reanalysis by the same author of Drabbe’s description of Aghu (1957), which was published in 2016.
In only 45 pages (!), Drabbe managed to present an incredible amount of Yonggom Wambon language data. The current work takes over 400 pages for their re-representation and reanalysis, and includes a 500-item wordlist that Drabbe had written a few years earlier. This book attempts both to increase our understanding of the peculiarities of this individual language, and to contribute to our understanding of the past and present of this still very under-documented part of our globe. An area where—as Drabbe foresaw—minority languages are disappearing, giving way to a common (national) language.
The author expresses his gratefulness to Drabbe, for having unravelled some of the complexities of the languages in this area, which, in Drabbe’s words, form ‘an eldorado for the practitioners of general linguistics’, ‘a labyrinth without escape for missionaries’, and—in the author’s words— ‘offer a unique and highly valuable perspective on specific communities in a specific space and time’.
Keywords
Citation
Collections
Source
Type
Book Title
Yonggom Wambon, a Dumut language of West Papua: Annotated Texts with Grammar and Vocabulary
Entity type
Publication
Access Statement
Open Access via publisher website
License Rights
Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND; creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)