ma manda birds of paradise

In order to break up the more draining tasks of interlinearizing stories and recording wordlists, I have been collecting a lot of vocabulary. It’s a more fun way to spend our time. One day I hope to document all of the words I have collected by producing a Ma Manda dictionary. Now that I have already gathered all the frequently used terms, it takes more creativity to find new words. The best way to get more words is to interlinearize a story, and any time I approach a new word I stop and ask questions about its meaning, and then often this opens up to other words. But this week I checked out from the library several books on PNG animals, one on birds, one on frogs, one on mammals, one on snakes, one on rats… I gave these books to them and told them to write down the name of any animal for which they see a picture. This is how I got about 100 new lexical items. I now have over 80 words just for different types of birds. For instance, I have seven different words for different types of Birds of Paradise that they have:

kondhnam – Emperor bird of paradise
dhmaak – Raggiana bird of paradise
yamayama – Lesser bird of paradise
fidhnhñdhnhñ – Wahnes’ six-wired bird of paradise
wandoñ – Huon astrapia
ghlandat – Magnificent riflebird (male)
dañgembhlam – Magnificent riflebird (female)

I really enjoy that part of my job. It’s cool to get a chance to look at the world through their eyes. So many of the names for birds are onomatopoeic, but the sounds they think they make are so different from the sounds we think they make (though their name for cat is miaauñ [think 'miaung']). Anyway, what’s cool is how they call some of these birds by compound names, like ‘frog face’ or ‘come go quickly’.

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