Annotated (re-)edition and translation of the early sources on and in Chamorro (1800-1950)

A project at the University of Bremen – Thomas Stolz and associates

Chamorro boasts of the earliest grammar and textbook of all languages of the Pacific. Father Sanvitores produced his famous catechism-cum-grammar in 1668. However, this early piece of missionary linguistics appeared in print only in 1954. The descriptive text is in Latin and thus not readily accessible to contemporary native speakers of Chamorro and many linguists worldwide who are not trained in the classics.

A similar fate i.e. inaccessibility holds for many other texts on and in Chamorro which were written before 1950. These texts are either written in languages which are no longer in common use in the Marianas (Dutch, German, Spanish, etc.) or in an earlier orthography of Chamorro. Apart from these difficulties, some of the texts exist only in manuscript form or were published in series or journals which are rare items in modern libraries.

We think that the modern community of Chamorro speakers and the community of linguists worldwide would benefit immensely from an edition of all these texts because they not only reflect the ideas linguists had of describing languages before structuralism took over, but also provide a rich source for Chamorro speakers who want to know about the earlier stages of their language, use older texts to rediscover long forgotten words, expressions and constructions and understand how outsiders looked at their language.

It goes without saying that the texts cannot simple be re-edited in facsimile. Since they are texts from a different historical period, they need to be translated (into English and, if possible, also into Chamorro) and commented upon – both from a linguistic and a historical point of view. According to our calculation, edition, translation and commentary will amount to some 3,000 to 4,000 printed pages. The edition will include texts by Fray Aniceto Ibáñez del Carmen (1863, 1865a-b, 1883), Georg Fritz (1903, 1904, 1907, 1910), Father Lopinot (1910, 1912, 1913, 1914), Jan Katz (1917), Hermann Costenoble (1940) and many others.

Cooperation with Pierre Winkler (Amsterdam/The Netherlands) and Steve Pagel (Halle/Germany) who are currently working on the very first text on and in Chamorro (Sanvitores’ grammar-cum-catechism) is part of the project.

For more information, contact stolz@uni-bremen.de