Brown did no research into the origins of writing and was told nothing. He borrows some of the symbols, which he identifies as of Roman alphabetical origin, from an early European.
SCRIPT
And in the three words which Brown appends to his Woleai
Values attributed to columns K, P, Q, and T, in parentheses, not attached; are given as approximately recorded in the field. The characters preceding the numbers in columns K-0 are in the same series as those preceding the corresponding lists of characters in figure 25 from the same informants, since these informants gave lists containing characters of both types.
PKESENT-DAY KNOWLEDGE AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE WRITING
Undoubtedly, some of the people whose reading skills we tested can also write. It appears, therefore, that the script is, or was at one time, geographically extended from Eauripik in the west to Puluwat, 300 miles to the east, and was known in all the inhabited islands in between.
NUMBER AND SEQUENCE OF CHARACTERS
ORIGIN OF THE WRITING
DISTINCTNESS OF THE TWO TYPES
Type 2; only one (Someki's), which appears to be in no formal order, has both types. Other informants gave us mixed lists, but nevertheless distinguish the characters as belonging to two types of writing.
SIMILARITY OF TYPE 2 SCRIPT TO THE ALPHABET
SYLLABIC VALUES
Meinicke (1876, p. 374) likewise refers to the natives of the Carolines and Marshalls as the foremost seafarers of the Pacific, far surpassing the Polynesians in this respect, and Kramer compares Micronesian and Polynesian geographical Imowledge with similar. The first knowledge of the Woleais comes from Spanish reports of 30 canoe loads of people from these.
THE ALPHABET OF TRUK
Daytoy a lugar ket addaan kadagiti uppat a subdibision: iti laud ti Ulithi, Fais ken Sorol; iti abagatan a laud ti Sonsorol, Pulo Anna, Merir, Tobi ken nalabit Mapia; iti daya, ti Pulp, Pulusuk ken Puluwat; ken iti tengnga, amin dagiti mapagnaedan nga isla ti grupo a kadawyan a naibagbaga a kas dagiti Woleais: Faraulep, Eauripik, Lamotrek, Elato, Ifaluk, Satawal, ken kasta met ti Woleai Atoll a mismo. 288 BUREAU TI ETNOLOHIA TI AMERIKO tBuU.178. ti intero a lugar ti Truk nga awan ti pagdagusan para iti panagdumaduma ti dialekto. Kasta met ti maysa kadagiti libro ni Logan {Ti Libro ti Pakasaritaan, 1881, p. 1) ket naglaon, agparang a para kadagiti panggep ti edukasion, iti dandani agpapada nga urnos: AEIOUFJKLMNA^PRI?ST.
That is, the names of the Trukese consonants are the same as the names and phonetic values of the Type 2 syllabic characters of the Woleais. ^^ There are only five vowels compared to the eight in the Type 2 lists, and the order of the characters is very different – we will try to explain these differences shortly – but. The Truk area thus appears to be the source of the Type 2 area of the Central Carolines.
ALFRED SNELLING AND THE TRUKESE CASTAWAYS
One of our informants, a man from Eauripik, confirmed the foregoing with the following words: 'An American Protestant missionary from Truk got lost on a boat during German times. The mention of a missionary named "Misinining" sent us to the archives of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, where we discovered that Rev. None of these published accounts mentioning Snelling say anything about his role in introducing the to write.
Frank Mahony, currently the District Anthropologist in Truk, has made the connection in the following interview with a Trukese named In Lamotrek, the white trader's Guamanian wife had taught the people how to write.
ADOPTION OF THE TRUKESE CHARACTERS
XII at the very end of the Satawal list (see Fig. 26), as if affixed after this transformation was accomplished, suggests this explanation. In Nomois, where Logan prepared the alphabet used in all the printed materials of Truk. These phonemic distinctions are probably also made in the speech of most of the other Woleais.
If missionaries had visited Puluwat earlier, as Snelling did the islands north of Truk in the course of his missionary work, or if Puluwat residents attended the mission school in Truk, it is possible that a separate introduction of the Puluwat may have occurred. alphabet there; there seem to have been native missionaries from Truk in Puluwat from time to time. This could possibly indicate that there were two separate introductions to the alphabet, each in a.
SPREAD OF TYPE 2 WRITING
HISTORY
INVENTION AT FARAULEP
Reports from the Sudsee Expedition state that at various times between 1900 and 1910 there was a copra station at Faraulep, with which several Japanese appear to have been associated. One informant from Eauripik states that the Type 1 script at Faraulep was made by a Japanese. The man from Faraulep claims that the Faraulep people invented the script themselves, but later they were helped by a Japanese and a Filipino.
A Woleai man who has lived in Faraulep since shortly after its invention insists that the Japanese Soshiki absolutely did not do that. All other informants simply claim that the Faraulep people whose names I mention were the inventors.
34; CAROLINE SCRIPT — RIESENBERG AND KANESHIRO 297
DATE OF INVENTION
DERIVATION OF CHARACTERS
29 and 41 have the same graphic shape and names as conventional tattoo elements, and may have been taken directly from the tattoo design rather than from the animals they represent. It is also important that the phonetic value of the Type 2 character is A^ (No. IX). Of the other characters, some may have been taken from decorative design elements, but we have not recognized any except those already described.
Indeed, it must be so, for the Carolingian dialects in these islands are extremely deficient in words. It is possible that he misheard the sounds: of course the word for canoe (No. 14) is wa, not war as Brown.
34; CAROLINE SCRIPT — RIESENBERG AND KANESHIRO 299
ANALYSIS OF THE WRITING
PHONEMES, PHONEMIC COMBINATIONS, AND CHARACTERS
All these characters, except those representing only vowels, have syllabic values of the consonant-plus-vowel or semivowel-plus-vowel pattern. Smith's phonemic analysis would indicate that there is a theoretical possibility of 624 such syllables (24 consonants and 2 semivowels combined with 24 vowels); with the addition of the 24 vowels when. There are actually only 162 syllables of the consonant-plus-vowel and semivowel-plus-vowel types, as well as 13 syllables composed of independent vowels, a total of 175.
Apparently the attributed values of these symbols are not the same as those of any other symbol, so their non-use means that the appropriate syllables are not included in these particular words, but may very well occur in others. In the first 50 words (not counting repetitions) of Smith's text there are 62 different syllables; in the next 50 words, 29 more syllables appear; in the next 50, another 18;.
LENGTH OF VOWEL NOT DISTINGUISHED
173 From Brown, Damm, Sarfert and Someki, and from our various informants, we have a total of 97 characters (78 of Type 1 and 19 of Type 2) used to write the Woleai language. We have compiled from Smith's textual materials a list of 301 Woleai words written in his spelling, and Table 1 shows the frequency of occurrence of all syllables among these 301 words. Some columns headed by other consonants (e.g. ch, j, n, rw, ill, z) have only one or two entries below them.
Even so, it is unlikely that more than, say, 250 or 300 syllables actually occur* in Woleai speech.
5), XIV+III (2)
Perhaps for this reason the natives of Woleais found it unnecessary to invent signs to distinguish them.
VOWEL CHARACTERS
It is clear that there is considerable variation in vocal value in these characters, as there must be if they are to represent them all. 13 (or 24, if we consider length) vowel phonemes when these phonemes do not occur in syllable combinations with consonants and semi-vowels. If we eliminate the 4 characters among the 13 which appear to occur only with prefixed semivowel values and if we disregard charactersVI and72, which do not occur in oiu- 222 wi'itten words, we have.
It is likely that additional examples of texts from more informants would clarify matters; it's possible that all 13 of these characters do. But on the basis of the available evidence, if we do not take into account the three characters (IV, . the others among the 13 characters, that leaves 94 characters out of a total of 97 to represent all possible syllabic combinations.
LACK OF EXACT CORRESPONDENCE OF CHARACTERS AND SYLLABLES
Four other characters out of these 13 occur only with semivowel and vowel values: II is ijoah in the only occurrence;. It seems that when it is necessary to present a sound different from the ascribed value of either. For example, we did not write tv as the assigned value of any character (it is possible, of course, that we misheard one of the tape values), but in the notation of the word f<vfih.
EFFECT OF DIALECTS
CAROLINE SCRIPT— RIESENBERG AND KANESHIRO 305 Smith as consonant-plus-ee or consonant-plus-eeA, the informants.
CAROLINE SCRIPT — RIESENBERG AND KANESHIRO 305 Smith as consonant-plus-ee or consonant-plus-eeA, the informants
REPRESENTATION OF FINAL CONSONANTS
306 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull.173 36, used for the syllable luu in the word F^/la/luu/s and for Iv in the word fae/Zv/w, also represents -I in the words vh/ Z ( as written .one informant out of two) and uuh/Z (both out of two informants). And the only instances where the character 31 is used final are in the words tuu/t and tuuh/^, where the character 31 otherwise has the value tu, tuu, tuuh, or tv; in practically all of them. In some cases, it seems that the consonant, not the vowel of the preceding syllable, determines which character should be used.
The only other time 68 is used is for the syllable sho in the word no/sho/s; while for sho in the word sho/g character 45 is used. If such relationships are of a functional nature, if the spelling system over the years of use has become arbitrarily conventional, or if some aesthetic judgment is applied that prevents or encourages the juxtaposition of some characters, it is an issue that we are unable to resolve. .
COMPARISON OF NATIVE TEXTS
SUMMARY
The syllabary spread to Faraulep where the shortcomings of the script became apparent, all consonant signs of the original alphabet now have syllabic values consisting only of consonants. The Faraulepese, between 1907 and 1909, invented a whole new set of symbols, Type 1, which took some of the signs from them. NaeoT''^'*^' CAROLINE SCRIPT— RIESENBERG AND KANESHIRO 311 Previous writers have speculated that the script represented the remains of an earlier}^ more developed system, that it was related to scripts of the Asian continent, that it linked was on Easter Island writing, etc.
But it has been demonstrated that the syllable Woleai represents a case of recent stimulus diffusion, like the Vaiand Cherokee. The script, which is still being added to by new inventors from time to time, only crudely represents the language for which it is used.
LITERATURE CITED
Words written by the natives of the Caroline Islands in the Carolinian script [on the left, words from Smith, Inhisorthography; on the right the spelling of these words in native signs. 318 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. Characters and their actual syllabic values arranged according to character sequence in Figures 25 and 26 - continued. shl she -sh oa yoa yoah yoeh. lihmw . raeZA)(2),fath-fathviftf(4),gozylhi(5),geragiroegi^Aj,mwalM, ngaZW, ulunhvMi, Ihi (2), kapeta/ftj, gamwoelhaettt (3), sitipaeZAi,maattj,itipae/Ai, itaeZfti. Pluses: in the first column, pluses indicate when two syllables are written with one character; in the columns below the informants' marks indicate when two characters are used to represent one syllable.
