Sivisa Titan: Sketch Grammar, Texts, Vocabulary Based on Material Collected by P. Josef Meier and Po Minis (Oceanic Linguistics Special Publications)

There are few published grammars of the languages of the Admiralty Islands. This work makes available valuable data compiled by Po Minis and the New Britain missionary P. Josef Meier for the Titan language. Meier published seventy-five texts in Titan (the corpus is about 25,000 words) in the journal Anthropos between 1906 and 1909 and an addendum in 1912. Stories contain brief information about the speakers and are glossed word-for-word in German and occasionally Latin.

Sivisa Titan is divided into three sections. The first is a sketch grammar based entirely on the texts collected by Meier and published by him in Anthropos. Part Two is a wordlist compiled from the texts with an English-Titan reversal. Part Three contains the texts published by Meier. The present work provides English glosses based on Meier’s German ones and free translations, which are not included by Meier. Sivisa Titan will be an invaluable addition to our knowledge about the Admiralty Islands subgroup of Oceania. It also illustrates the importance of ethnographic texts collected in the local language and possibilities for analysis based on materials originally gathered for another purpose.