A Comprehensive Comparison of Lexemes in the ... - SIL International

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suggesting that SW Tanna and Vaha are in fact dialects of one language.
Bordering the Whitesands language group, Vaha is 8 percent more similar to
Whitesands than SW Tanna is. In other words, most of the lexemes in Vaha that
are not cognates with SW Tanna are instead cognates with Whitesands. The two
languages most dissimilar are Kwamera and Whitesands, which have only 48
percent cognates. 7
Lynch’s data (in Lynch 1978), based on a modified Swadesh wordlist, shows
Lenakel, N Tanna, and Whitesands to have at least 70 percent cognates, making them
almost a dialect chain. Specifically, he predicted the similarity between Lenakel and N
Tanna to be 73–80 percent, between N Tanna and Whitesands to be 81–86 percent, and
between Lenakel and Whitesands to be 75–81 percent. Based on the data and phonological
criteria for cognates in this study, the comparison of Lenakel and N Tanna is close to
Lynch’s (71 percent), but this study found at least 11 percent lower lexical similarity for
both N Tanna–Whitesands and Lenakel–Whitesands.
Table 2.3. Degree of correspondence between the languages of Tanna.
Kwamera Lenakel N Tanna SW Vaha Whitesands
Tanna
Kwamera 49% 51% 62% 61% 48%
Lenakel 71% 59% 59% 64%
N Tanna 53% 54% 70%
SW Tanna 90% 53%
Vaha 61%
Whitesands
2.2.2 Finding identical lexemes in languages
A second application of a comparative analysis is that it enables us to find
identical lexemes in languages and to determine which categories are most
resistant to change. The table in Appendix A lists 81 common lexemes that were
discovered which are (nearly) identical in the six Tanna languages of this study.
Loan words such as kon ‘corn,’ kau ‘cow,’ tata ‘father,’ and toka, a Polynesian word
referring to a kind of dance, are not listed, since they are expected to maintain a
strong resemblance to their original form. Similarly, proper names (for
geographical terms, demigods, and ghosts), onomatopoeia (e.g., tuk-tuk for
summoning pigs), grammatical infixes (e.g., perfective aspect, non-singular
marker), and interjections (e.g., Aweh!) are not counted, since they are unlikely to
vary to any extent across Tanna’s language boundaries.
The data in Appendix A suggests that words related to kastom (i.e.,
traditional religion, ritual, and social organization in Vanuatu) are particularly
resistant to language change. This is evident from the fact that the list of (nearly)
identical lexemes contains a fair number of such terms (see Table 2.4).
7 Interestingly, Tryon’s (1976) study of 292 lexemes suggested that the most dissimilar languages are
Kwamera (Port Resolution) and Lenakel, with a correspondence of 47 percent. This is remarkably close to
the data here (49 percent).