OLAC Record oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0021-6CCF-3

Metadata
Title:		Snake Mother
		Languages of Southwest Ambrym
Contributor:		von Prince
Contributor (annotator):		JM
Contributor (consultant):		FT
Coverage:		Vanuatu
Date:		2009-10-15
Description:		The senior male speaker tells a long story of a young man whose mother is a gigantic snake, which turns out to be problematic when he wants to marry.
		The goal of this project is the documentation of the three major languages in the Southwest of the pacific island of Ambrym, Vanuatu. The major objectives include the creation of both academic and local dictionaries, grammatical descriptions of the three languages as well as extensive recordings of the languages with an emphasis on language use in connection with specific cultural pracitces such as sand drawings, dances and songs.
		The story is about a young man whose mother is a gigantic snake and lives in a cave. He regularily goes out to dances in other parts of the island where he impresses the young women who also attend the dance. He also sleeps in a man sized cocoon and knows a song which attracts young women irresistibly to him. Two such young women thereupon declare their desire to marry him and the three of them go to see his mother. When the women see the gigantic snake, one of them runs, the other pees herself but stays. She invites her family to come and attend the wedding ceremony. The snake advises her son to create gigantic amounts of food and goods out of the leaves of a cycad. When the guests leave with their gifts, the snake utters a curse that makes the sea go wild. The canoes shipwreck, all the goods are scattered and land at the different islands, which explains why certain plants and goods are only to be found on some islands but not on others today. The snake is said to still live in a cave on Ambrym to this day.
		This informant from Emyotungan is a fieldworker of the Cultural Center of Vanuatu and has been involved in attempts to conserve the language prior to the project. As many of the informants, he is very much concerned with the growing influence of Bislama on the language and is trying to avoid using loan words. His knowledge of stories and his commitment to preserve the language have been very helpful.
		Kilu von Prince has chosen the grammar of Daakaka to be the subject of her dissertation. Her purpose in the DoBeS project "Languages of West Ambrym" is to document and to help preserve the languages Daakaka and Ral kalein by collecting language data, establishing lexical databases and providing local communities with orthographies, dictionaries and printed accounts of traditional stories for use in education.
		JM has assisted at most of the transcriptions and translations of the recordings in Daakaka, being a very gifted informant. He has spend part of his education in the country's capital Vila.
Format:		audio/x-wav
		text/x-eaf+xml
Identifier:		oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0021-6CCF-3
Publisher:		Manfred Krifka
		Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin
Subject:		Discourse
		Narrative
		Unspecified
		Daakaka language
		Dakaka
Subject (ISO639):		bpa
Type:		audio
OLAC Info
Archive:		The Language Archive at the MPI for Psycholinguistics
Description:		http://www.language-archives.org/archive/www.mpi.nl
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for OLAC format
GetRecord:		Pre-generated XML file
OAI Info
OaiIdentifier:		oai:www.mpi.nl:1839_00-0000-0000-0021-6CCF-3
DateStamp:		2017-02-14
GetRecord:		OAI-PMH request for simple DC format
Search Info
Citation:		FT (consultant); von Prince; JM (annotator). 2009-10-15. Manfred Krifka.
Terms:		area_Pacific country_VU iso639_bpa
Inferred Metadata
Country:		Vanuatu
Area:		Pacific