Lexical Transfer from Marshallese to Mokilese: A Case of Intra-Micronesian Borrowing

Abstract

1.0 OVERVIEW. There is some nonlinguistic evidence that the people of Mokil, an atoll located in the Eastern Caroline Islands, have been in periodic contact with the people of the Marshall Islands from a time predating Western discovery. The oral histories of Mokil tell that at least one such contact involved large numbers of Marshallese voyagers who stayed on Mokil for an extended period of time. Also, elements of Marshallese material culture have apparently been transferred to Mokil. Linguistic evidence for such contacts, however, has gone largely unrecognized. The Mokilese-English Dictionary (Harrison and Albert 1977) identifies only two of 4,156 main entries as being of Marshallese origin. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that there is in fact substantial linguistic evidence for contact between these two Micronesian peoples. This evidence is largely in the form of an extensive number of Mokilese lexical items which we argue to be loanwords from Marshallese. Our identification of such loanwords is based on intersecting phonological, morphological, semantic, and distributional criteria. The selection and application of these criteria are discussed and defended. We conclude that the claim that extensive contact occurred between