Y Santa Biblia Word List Cover

Micronesian Area Research Center A complete Word list from

y Santa Biblia (1908) with example sentences in Chamorro and english

Compiled by

Alexander M. Kerr October 2008

An online publication of the Micronesian Area Research Center University of Guam

INTRODUCTION This report provides a complete list of words found in Y Santa Biblia, a partial translation into the Chamorro language of the bible that was first published in 1908. An interesting history of the rediscovery and recent re-printing of this work can be found in the Spring 2003 issue of Isles magazine published by the Guam-Micronesian Mission of the Seventh Day Adventists, Agana Heights, Guam. Downloadable versions of this bible are also available online at www.chamorrobible.org.

The following list with example sentences in Chamorro and English was assembled using scripts written in Mathematica 5.0 from ASCII text versions of the bible available online in Chamorro at www.chamorrobible.org/ and in English at www.o-bible.org/.

There were 11,148 unique words (out of 132,371 total words). Some of these are only spelling variants, e.g., abale and ábale, (meaning "adultery"). Further, lexical units often considered as words, as in Topping et al (1971. Chamorro-English Dictionary), remain here as affixes, such as the possessive "pronouns" in adengmo ("your foot") and adengña ("his/her/its foot").

The combinatorics of retaining derived words such as these no doubt multiplies the apparent number of unique words compared to that found in other dictionaries of the Chamorro language. Further multiplicity is adduced from obvious spelling variants, such as abanicoña and abanicuña, (both meaning, in context, "his fan"), from, respectively, Mark 3:12 and Luke3:17.

This list was first assembled to investigate whether the Chamorro language followed Zipf's Law (Zipf, G. K. 1949. Human behaviour and the Principle of Least Effort. Addison-Wesley, Reading MA). This generalisation states that the rank-order frequency distribution of words in a language follow a power law relation f(x) = Cx - α, where f(x) is the frequency of a word, x is the descending ranked order of freqency, while C and α are constants.

In words, the frequency with which a word is used in a language follows a straight line with negative slope on a log-log plot of word frequency versus descending word rank. I reasoned that languages with extensive affixing and reduplication might deviate notably because of the potential excess of very long words. However, the Chamorro language as written in Y Santa Biblia conforms nicely to a power law with C ≈ 8.75 and α ≈ 1.75.

I also hope that this compilation will prove useful to those producing a full dictionary of the Chamorro language.

Alexander M Kerr Mangilao, Guam October 2008

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