Albert J Schutz

Discovering Fijian Albert J Schutz

This book traces the early history of the study of the Fijian language. The main part of the story begins with the dozen words collected by Cook's naturalist, William Anderson, in 1777, and ends with David Hazlewood's Fijian grammar and dictionary in 1850. The account focuses on how the study of the language advanced, especially through the efforts of several Wesleyan missionaries. Their first ground-breaking innovation was David Cargill's and William Cross's decision in 1835-36 to simplify the writing of what sounded (to English hearers) like consonant clusters, but were actually unit phonemes. This system, elegant in its simplicity, is still criticized by linguistic amateurs, but lauded by its users and by professional linguists. The study analyzes 20 word lists that were gathered during this period, ranging in size from a dozen to several hundred. Collected mainly by explorers, traders, beachcombers, and roving philologists, these annotated lists are valuable especially for their early examples of "Foreigner Talk"-the language style that Fijians used to communicate with outsiders. Finally, the book discusses Hazlewood's linguistic contributions, noting that his analysis of vowel length as an essential alphabetic feature predates similar advances elsewhere in the Pacific (especially in Hawai'i) by nearly a century. This contrast becomes even more dramatic when one compares living conditions in Hawai'i with those in Fiji, where missionaries were forced to endure family illnesses and deaths, natural disasters, internal warfare, and cannibalism.