Produced by David Starner, with help from Charles Franks
and the Distributed Online Proofreading Team.
Transcriber's Note: Some umlauts and other fine distinctionsof Sa'a orthography have been lost. The Lau orthography iscorrect as given.
Lau is the name given to the language spoken by the inhabitants ofthe artificial islets which lie off the northeast coast of BigMalaita, Solomon Islands. The language spoken on the coast from Uruon the northeast to Langalanga, Alite Harbor, on the northwest ofBig Malaita, is practically Lau. On the west coast there isconsiderable admixture of Fiu, which is the language of the bushbehind the Langalanga lagoon. In Dr. Codrington's "MelanesianLanguages," pp. 39 et seq., certain words are given as spoken atAlite in Langalanga. These words are probably Fiu rather than Lau.
The purest Lau is spoken at Sulufou, one of the artificial isletsnear Atta Cove. The inhabitants of Ai-lali, on the mainland of BigMalaita opposite the island Aio, are an offshoot of the Lau-speakingpeoples. In Port Adam (Malau) on Little Malaita, some 12 milesnorth of Sa'a, there are two villages, Ramarama and Malede,inhabited by Lau-speaking peoples, and the inhabitants of thesevillages hold as a tradition that their forefathers migrated fromSuraina, near Atta Cove, 80 miles away, along the coast to thenorth.
The Lau of this grammar and vocabulary was learned from dealingswith the Port Adam natives and also from a stay of several weekswith Rev. A. I. Hopkins, at Mangoniia, on the mainland opposite theartificial islet Ferasubua.
It is not claimed that the Lau here presented is the same as the Lauof the northeast coast of Big Malaita. Doubtless owing to the PortAdam peoples being surrounded by Sa'a-speaking peoples, they haveadopted Sa'a words and methods of speech to some extent. The womenof the hill peoples above Port Adam have largely been procured aswives for the Port Adam men and thus there has been a tendency forthe distinctiveness of the Lau language to disappear and for theSa'a words to be adopted. While this tendency was perhaps not verygreat previous to the introduction of Christianity (for the villagechildren always follow the language of the father rather than thatof the mother), the teachers in the village schools, afterChristianity was introduced, necessarily used the Sa'a books and,when translations were eventually made into Lau, words and phrasesof Sa'a crept in. So far as lay in the power of the present author,he has endeavored to eliminate these Sa'a elements from the presentwork.
In the translations made into Lau, some use has been made of thegerundive, following the use in Sa'a; but until we have furtherevidence of the validity of this usage it must be regarded as notbelonging to the genius of the Lau language, and it is thereforeomitted here.
It will be seen that Lau is a typical Melanesian language and hasfew marked peculiarities. In Sa'a there is a distinctive use of theshortened forms of the pronouns of the first and second persons,au and 'o, suffixed to verbs and prepositions as object; in Lauthe same shortening is not effected and the longer forms nau,oe, are used.
It has not been thought proper to represent any break inpronunciation such as occurs in Sa'a in such words, e. g., as iafish, Sa'a i'e