Project tracks evolution of the Chamorro language

 A group of linguists from the Universitat Bremen in Germany has embarked on a project that would possibly aid in the preservation of the Chamorro language in contemporary times.

Dr. Thomas Stolz and Barbara Dewein, who are part of the five-member team working on the Chamorrica project, discussed some of their findings in a presentation sponsored by the NMI Humanities Council at the American Memorial Park Visitors Center Theater last Saturday.

“We’re trying to find as many manuscripts-unedited manuscripts-as possible that deal with the Chamorro language during the colonial times before 1950,” said Stolz in an interview after the presentation.

The Chamorrica project, which started a year ago, is funded by the German Science Foundation.

According to Stolz, the manuscripts that they to compile and study date back to the German and Spanish colonial periods and include all materials published in languages other than English.

Stolz disclosed that they have so far found and gathered manuscripts from various archives in Germany, including archives of missionary societies. He said collecting all the materials was not easy since there was “no principal way to find the manuscripts.”

Dewein said that some of the project’s challenges include finding pertinent manuscripts, doing research on the various authors of the texts, and the transfer of these texts to modern orthography due to different opinions on what is considered modern orthography.

“It’s a little bit [of] guesswork,” Stolz told Saipan Tribune. “So far we have been rather unexpectedly successful, in a way, and the number of manuscripts waiting for the first publication is relatively sizeable.”

Stolz said that among these manuscripts they discovered is the unpublished Chamorro-German dictionary written by Hermann Constenoble called the “Collection of Basic Words of the Chamoro Language,” a 300-page manuscript that contained between 2,500 to 3,000 entries.

Born in 1893 in Rheinfelde, Germany, Constenoble was the oldest of nine children of the first German settlers in the Marianas. He lived in the Marianas for 10 years and left Guam in 1913.

Stolz said that Constenoble’s work is very important in their project mainly because the grammar is the “most detailed grammar ever written in Chamorro” and contains more information than any later publications in Chamorro.

“This grammar stands out in so far as the author grew up in Guam and Saipan and he had fairly good knowledge of the language. He claims personally that it was native-like,” Stolz said about Constenoble’s manuscript.

Stolz said the materials they have gathered so far reveal that there are “quite a few words” that are no longer found in modern dictionaries. “The question is, have they fallen into oblivion or are they simply skipped over in the dictionaries?” he said.

Another finding, Stolz said, is information on the intonation of the Chamorro language, which he said is described in Constenoble’s work in a “very detailed fashion.”

“What he says is not in line with later descriptions of the singsong (intonation) of the Chamorro and it would be interesting if it has changed due to foreign influence,” noted Stolz.

Stolz said the group is planning to do a series of publications involving book-length studies of texts that they will find. He said they are currently working on the re-edition of Constenoble’s “German Grammar” published in 1940.

Stolz hopes that the re-edition would have an English translation to make it accessible to the native population.

“People who are interested in revitalizing their language and making it survive in the 21st century, perhaps they will find words, grammatical constructions, idiomatic expressions and meanings that are no longer in use but are properly Chamorro elements and they can be reintroduced into the current language without having to borrow words from English or from Spanish,” he said of the re-edition.

Dewein, for her part, said, “With the project that we’re working on, I hope that we can make a contribution to create an awareness that a lot of text have been produced about Chamorro and then by the translation, make it available to those people who are actually studying it.”

The two will depart for a one-week stay in Guam tomorrow, with plans to intensify the project through further visits to the Marianas next year and in 2013.