Dictionary Project

How I got involved

One of the lingering after effects of being back in Pohnpei was a sentimental desire to stay involved in that faraway world, that is, stay involved in some practical way that I could manage from my base in Kansas--not an easy thing to imagine.

My first idea was to become a pen pal with students at my elementary school in Saladak, all of whom are young enough to be my grandchildren. Sure, I could help them with their English essays. After all, I had taught remedial English for ten years at the University of Kansas. And sure, they could help me improve my Pohnpeian language skills. There are plenty of Facebook exchanges going on in the language, from which I could easily learn new vocabulary, new structures, and plenty of idioms. But, in truth, I could not imagine either of these kinds of involvement making much of a difference either for Pohnpeians or for me, even if we went to the effort to attempt it.

Another idea popped up when I was visiting with Ken Rehg in Honolulu after getting back from Pohnpei. He was excited to begin work on a second edition of the Ponapean-English dictionary, for which he had received a grant from the Pohnpei legislature. He had a team that included a programmer at the U of H plus Damian Sohl and Robert Andreas in Pohnpei. The idea was for them to work from their local offices on the new edition using custom software that would compile their contributions each week to build more and more recent and comprehensive versions of the dictionary.

I asked Ken to let me know if he could think of any way I could help out in this task, and he assured me that there would be editing work somewhere along the way. After I got home and unpacked my Pohnpeian Bible, it occurred to me that there were probably many words in it that did not make it into the first edition of the dictionary. I emailed Ken to ask if he knew of any Pohnpeian language electronic versions of the Bible.

"I have a bunch of files that some Jesuits created," replied. It sounded as if just converting those files might be a cumbersome task, so I just Googled around for a few seconds and--lo and behold!--there was a website for the Bible in Pohpeian. Amazing.

FSM Bible Site

I later found another one, which probably uses the same base text.

UCC Bible Site

Each page consisted of a single chapter. Here in the right column, for example, is the opening paragraph of Senesis (Genesis). Maybe this was the way I could help Ken with the Bible words, but how could I extract just the unique occurrence of each word from a text file in which the word might occur 5 or 20 or 600 times?

I phoned my son Chris, who is a software engineer, and asked how hard it would be to write a program that did this. He kindly suggested I surf the internet before I asked him to re-invent the wheel. In a few more minutes I had discovered a free program called Simple Concordance, which I downloaded and installed. It did exactly what I needed it to.

Here, for example, are some the unique words in the Letter to Philemon:

ahnkipene, ahnsou, ahpw, akan, amwail, anahn,

The program could also display the contexts in which each word was found, with the line number referring back to the line in the original text file:

katamankin

39 Mehlel, I sohte uhdahn anahne katamankin komwi me komw /pweipwandkihong

katapan

23 ong komwi, ahpw met e inenen katapan ong /komwi oh pil ong ngehi

33 rehn Krais. Met me inenen /katapan ong ie! Oh ia uwen eh pahn

33 ong ie! Oh ia uwen eh pahn katapan ong komwi, nin duwen ladu

katepen

23 Ahnsou ehu /mahs, sohte katepen ohl menet ong komwi, ahpw

Some background on this story

The first professionally published Pohnpeian-English dictionary did not come out until I got back from the Peace Corps. There had been earlier word lists that circulated among missionaries and Peace Corp Volunteers. The one I recall was compiled by Alan Burdick.

At any rate, when I finally did see the larger dictionary, I found it at the University of Kansas library, along with a companion volume on Pohnpeian grammar. This was back around 1982, after Elaine and I had been in Lawrence for a few years. I kept both books for several days, pondering what treasures they would have been if only they had been available while I was still working on the island. On the other hand, the amount of information they contained was daunting, especially the grammar. Pohnpeian is way more elaborate and complex than the simple structures we memorized in our language huts. I suppose that, given time, I probably could have learned most of the words in that dictionary, but to master the syntactic structures without help from a teacher, would have been another story.

And today, even if I had such a teacher, what business would I have pursuing such an exotic topic? This dilemma was symbolic of a more general discomfort I was feeling about staying in touch with the Peace Corps chapter of my life. What sense did it make? In Pohnpei I was told by my Saladak friends that the Mormons had a superb language training method and that after six months, their missionaries were speaking excellent Pohnpeian, even by native-speaker standards. It made me envious.

While I was in Kolonia I tried to find some book or periodical printed in Pohnpeian. I went to the public library, which was only a block from our hotel. Nothing in Pohnpeian there, not even a Pohnpeian-English dictionary! I tried to buy a Bible in Pohnpeian but the stores were out of stock. In desperation I mentioned my plight to Dakar Apram, the current principal of Saladak School. He turned out to also be a minister in the local Protestant congregation. He had his own copy of the Bible brought up from his car and insisted that I accept it, which I did reluctantly and with much gratitude.

I worried that the Bible had cost him a bundle and that I had blundered into one of those cultural situations where he felt obligated to offer it as a gift. I also knew that it would have been a gaffe for me to refuse it. However, I later learned that even Bibles translated into languages as unfamiliar as Pohnpeian typically cost between $15-$30, a replacement expense that my principal could easily afford. So now I have my own copy, finally. Here are the first few verses of Genesis, Chapter 1, in Pohnpeian:

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Over the summer of 2013 I went through each web page of the online Pohnpeian Bible (each chapter of a Bible book was stored on a single web page), saved the text, and ran it through the concordance software. I ended up sending Ken a list of 19,569 unique words in the Pohnpeian Bible.

Just how many of these were already in the first edition of the dictionary remains to be determined, but it will definitely add more heft to the volume. There is still much more work to be done in Pohnpei, where Damian and Robert are compiling additional lists. My role now is to copyedit the English definitions and example sentences that are proposed by the Micronesian authors.

I'm really happy that I was able to help with the dictionary. It's definitely more than I could have hoped for.