Owner of the Story, Owner of the Places: Place Names and Oral Tradition in Alor Island

Description

The aim of this paper is the linguistic description and etymological reconstruction of several Abui place names from Alor Island that partly elude the standard etymological process. Their origins and original meanings, indeed, are shown by ancient oral traditional stories belonging to the local community and substantiating their cultural identity. Abui are aboriginal Papuan people of Alor Island (South-East Indonesia, Alor Island, Timor area). Their language, Abui, is a Papuan language recently documented and deeply interwoven with the culture and cultural identity of Abui people. A number of Abui place names in Alor Island can be ‘glossed’ and etymologically reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method and through field linguistics techniques. However, their remote and authentic meaning for the local community is explained and revealed through undocumented and unwritten oral myths and legends that need to be reconstructed according to language documentation methodologies. These oral traditional tales give the ‘real’ reason of the origins of the related place names and unveil a social system shared by some aboriginal communities all over the world and, at the same time, specific of Abui people, the system of the ‘ownership of stories and places (through their place names)’. Among several Abui
story-tellers providing their audience with an oral traditional tale, only one is the real ‘owner’ of the story, the individual who knows all the details and the parts of the tale and who is authorized to share it with his audience and, sometimes, also with foreigners. Through this knowledge, the ‘owner’ of the story earns the social prestige of a ‘big man’ and, since he knows the ‘true’ origins of the place names belonging to the story, he becomes the ‘ideal owner’ of all the places mentioned in the story itself. Our paper documents for the first time in a comprehensive way this system of ownership of stories and places through place names in Abui society and provides the etymological reconstruction of some Abui place names according to a dual perspective: a) traditional etymological reconstruction in the context of diachronic toponymy; b) exhaustive etymological reconstruction in the context of Abui story-telling and of the ‘ownership of stories system’. This work is highly multidisciplinary and associates etymology with field linguistics, language documentation, diachronic toponymy, and comparative mythology.

Period	26 Aug 2021
Event title	27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences (ICOS): ICOS Kraków 2021
Event type	Conference
Conference number	27
Location	Kraków, PolandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International