Tongue traveller

One man’s quest to save Pacific Island languages from extinction

Landing on the tiny island of Rimatara in the Austral Islands, French Polynesia, Karl Rensch knew no-one.

The island was only accessible by sea and its main town was a cluster of huts near the beach. After locating the mayor and explaining his mission, Dr Rensch was offered the house of a woman who had run away to romance on a larger island, leaving the front door half open in her haste to leave.

After uprooting the plants which were growing inside, Dr Rensch started to tidy. He’d been warned about the rats – big omnivorous ship rats known as Rattus norvegicus – and no rat traps on the island to catch them with. He set about making his own traps, balancing an inverted plastic basin on a pin which was connected to some cheese by a piece of fi shing line. He caught four rats in all – he had to take each one down to the sea, to drown them.

The possibility of documenting and researching the language and culture of Rimatara was beginning to seem quite promising when a hurricane struck the island.

“Trees were down over all the roads, every house and plantation on the island was damaged. For months, no-one would have the time to sit and talk with me. There was no point hanging around, so I left Rimatara on a French supply ship which had brought in food and building material,” Dr Rensch says.

Lexicographers don’t normally have a reputation as adventurers.

Stereotypically, a person who studies words is expected to be a besuited scholar surrounded by books, toiling away in isolation, honing ever-more precise definitions for words while earnestly sipping tea.

Karl Rensch, then, is a mould breaker. A man possessed with an enthusiasm for the road less travelled, he has visited dozens of little-known Pacific islands to study, record and publish the language and culture  of tiny nation-states which have hitherto been largely overlooked by the western world

In an exhausting race against globalism, Dr Rensch is a frenetic, Hawaiian shirt-clad enigma, still shaking the sands of a thousand white beaches from his shoes.

It all started a long way from the sea, working with older Aborigines in South Australia, helping to document endangered Aboriginal languages.

“These seniors were just sitting in the heat in front of some primitive huts which the South Australian government had provided. They got the pension every two weeks if they had a birth certificate. Then unexpectedly, Ginger, my main Antikirinya language informant, passed away.

“I had wanted to study languages in Polynesia for some time. There were sort of white spots on the map where little was known about the local languages, so I decided to head there."

For six weeks he was stranded in Noumea, the capital of New Caledonia, denied permission to visit Wallis Island, but this proved fortuitous. Since the 1950s, Wallis Islanders have been lured by work in nickel mines of New Caledonia, and now approximately 18,000 live there – four times the population on Wallis Island itself. Dr Rensch was thus able to familiarise himself with Wallisian culture and begin documenting Wallisian language in earnest well before he finally gained permission to travel to the island.

“Polynesians are typically worried that their kids will lose their mother tongue and identity,” Dr Rensch says. “In Noumea, the children and grand-children of Wallis islanders who had emigrated in the 1950’s had been born and raised in a relatively westernised, French-speaking society and most of them are basically monolingual French."

While Wallis Island has a population of just over 4,000, the universal adherence to Catholicism meant the island had its own bishop and it was this authority who finally gave Dr Rensch entry to Wallis Island.

“The bishop, a native of Wallis, saw the benefit of what I intended to do and so I ended up living at his residence on Wallis Island with three Wallisian brothers, under the protection of the highly respected bishop,” Dr Rensch says.

“The French administration was still not very happy that I was there, but there was little they could do. The great benefit of being at the bishop’s house was that people would visit every day seeking help and favours of the bishop, and I made lots of contacts.”

After six months of research on the island, the lexicographer returned to Australia and began to compile the first Wallisian-French dictionary to be produced in more than a century. An original version was compiled by a French missionary in the 1870s, but the language had since changed significantly — only about 60 per cent of the entries in that dictionary were still known to the island’s present inhabitants.

“The rate of vocabulary change is incredible. In 1870 there was neither car nor cow. Also, there had originally been lots of words related to traditional beliefs and legends, but after Catholicism, there was a whole set of new words to be coined, for example: church, altar and sacrament.

“Initially lots of foreign words had been borrowed from English, particularly because the first major trade was with people from Fiji. Wallisians adapted English words to their syllable structure and sound inventory to describe new things. For example, sugar is ‘suka’ (pronounced ‘soo-kah’) and ‘sitima’sugar is ‘suka’ (pronounced ‘soo-kah’) and ‘sitima’ is the word for boat, as the first big ships they saw were steamers."

It took three more field trips to Wallis to complete the dictionary. Finding no publisher for the tome, the enterprising researcher set up his own publishing house, Archipelago Press, and exported it.

He then moved on to the neighbouring island of Futuna, which despite its proximity and similarly small population, also has its own language. He republished the French-Futuna dictionary that had been out of print for more than 100 years. While the dictionary was a start, the language of each island would not be taught in schools unless there were texts available, so Dr Rensch set about writing books for children, re-telling Wallis and Futuna Island legends in their own language. He also published these, producing small runs of books for sale.

“So far I haven’t lost a penny on publishing. Archipelago Press makes very little money, but it enables the people of those islands to keep their language and culture alive,” Dr Rensch says.

He then produced a French-Wallisian dictionary and a language book on Wallis grammar (“you can’t teach a language unless you know how it works”) and a history of both Wallis and Futuna islands. The publications are now officially being used in primary and secondary schools on Wallis as well as in New Caledonia.

After capturing much of the Wallis and Futuna languages, Dr Rensch moved on to Mangareva in French Polynesia, 1,600 kilometres from Tahiti and not far from Pitcairn Island.

Mangareva had a population of just 400, but all were quite well off from the production of valuable black pearls that occur naturally as a result of the minerals present in the island’s lagoon.

It took years for Dr Rensch to book a ticket to the island, as there was only one small 18-seater aircraft once a month from Pape’ete to Rikitea, the main village of Mangareva. When he finally secured a flight, he happened to sit next to the island’s schoolteacher.

He lived with the teacher and his family for seven months, documenting the language and culture of the island, but succumbed to ciguatera, an illness from eating infected fish. In remote parts of the Pacific, fish is a staple diet, by tradition and necessity, but in some areas the consumption of fish can be hazardous. In Mangareva ciguatera is a problem dating back to the early contact days. colonists had released goats on the island, and the defecation of wild mountain goats polluted both the island’s groundwater and the lagoon into which it ran. This pollution and other human interferences kill live coral in the lagoon. Fish eating dead coral develop ciguatera and pass it down the food chain on to humans. While all islanders normally fished for medium-sized fish outside the lagoon in the open sea, fish poisoning was not uncommon.

While Dr Rensch was on the island, he became very sick and his schoolteacher friend died, aged just 42, from conditions believed to be aggravated by repeated bouts of fish poisoning.

The importance of being able to identify fish species known to be easily infected by ciguatera led Dr Rensch to his latest book, which documents more than 8,000 names used across Polynesia for fish species. By collating the local names of fish and identifying them by their scientific Latin name, he hopes locals, visitors and scientists will be able to communicate across language barriers about dangerous species and reduce the risk of consuming poisonous fish. The book has already attracted great interest from Pacific fishery and health departments, international fishermen and ichthyologists.

With a comprehensive fish dictionary added to his achievements, Dr Rensch has now shifted his enthusiasms to ethnobotany – the description and study of traditional uses of plants endemic to the Pacific. Followed closely by multinational pharmaceutical companies, the emerging global interest in ethnobotany to find remedies to certain diseases is a field of vast potential that will no doubt keep sand beneath Dr Rensch’s sandals for many years to come.

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