Aghu: annotated texts with grammatical introduction and vocabulary lists

Abstract

This book has as its primary aim to make Drabbe’s 1957 Spraakkunst van het Aghu-dialect van de Awyu-taal available to a wider scientific public. Petrus Drabbe (1887-1970) was a missionary of the Holy Heart, who worked between 1912 and 1960 in the Philippines, the Moluccan Tanimbar islands, and, from 1935 onwards, on the south coast of Dutch New Guinea (present West Papua, Indonesia). As Drabbe appeared to have a great skill for language learning and language description, his mission decided to appoint him as a ‘mission linguist’, which meant that he could devote most of his time to the analysis and description of local languages. Over a period of 25 years, Drabbe described over ten different languages in more or less detail, Aghu being only one of them.