[Note: this transcription was produced by an automatic OCR engine]

INTRODUCTION xxxv
As regards the use and spelling of native names, some explana-
tion is necessary. Averylarge numberot these have been recorded,
generally in the dialect of Seniang, for divers plants, ‘birds,
animals, and sea-creatures, and the great majority of them
have not been translated, although a few have been identiï¬Åed.
For the former the native terms must of necessity be retained ;
for the latter, the Latin names are often longer, more
cumbersome, and no less unfamiliar to the average reader than
are their Malekulan ones, which have therefore been employed
throughout for all but the commonest plants such as the cycas,
tree~fern, etc. There are also many native words for various
ritual objects for which inevitably there are no English
equivalents. Moreover, there are in the following pages,
particularly those which describe the ritual lite of the people,
a number of phrases or formulae, spoken on certain ceremonial
occasions, which have not been translated. It may be felt that
these burden the book unduly, and that it would have been
better to omit them entirely. In view, however, of the fact
that the people of Malekula are dwindling in numbers, and that
their culture is rapidly dying out, it seemed better to preserve
and put on record even what is as yet unexplained in the hope
that before it is too late, other workers may elicit the interpreta-
tion of these passages. It is not enough to translate them, tor,
particularly in their ceremonial life and language, the Malekulans
make great use oi metaphor-—as, for example, the use of the
word meaning " fowl â€ù for apig, and that meaning " bird â€ù for
a candidate or novice—and thus the translated meaning and
the true signiï¬Åcance of a sentence may be, and frequently are,
entirely different. -
Another linguistic difficulty presented itself in writing up
these ï¬Åeld-notes. During the early months of his stay in
particular, but also to a certain extent throughout it, Deacon
was very inconsistent in his spelling of native words. No satis-
factory phonetic scrip for the use of ï¬Åeld-workers in the West
Paciï¬Åc had been elaborated when he went out, and the printed
phonetic alphabet used by several of the missions was not suitable
for writing. The situation was further complicated by the fact
that, on the one hand the signiï¬Åcant phonemes in the different
dialects are to some extent unalike, and, on the other, that the