Ross Malcolm, Pawley Andrew, Osmond Meredith (eds).The Lexicon of Proto Oceanic. The culture and environment of ancestral Oceanic society 4. Animals

Canberra, Australia: Pacific Linguistics, School of Culture, History and Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, The Australian National University, 2011. — xxvi + 576 p. — (Pacific Linguistics 621). — ISBN: 9780858836266.This is the fourth of a series of volumes (first meant to be 5, now 7) on the lexicon of Proto Oceanic (POc) language. The major headings under which animals are divided in this volume, e.g. Fish, Birds, Aquatic invertebrates, etc., largely follow English-language rather than Oceanic categories. There are several reasons for this choice. One is that descriptions of Oceanic taxonomies of animals are few and imperfect. Another is that although the best-described Oceanic taxonomies typically agree with one another in some respects, they vary in others. Yet another is that we assume the readers would be more likely to look, say, for ‘bats’ under Mammals than under Birds. In keeping with the exceptionally rich diversity of marine fauna in Oceania and its economic and cultural importance to Oceanic societies, three (chapters 2-4) of the seven chapters that follow the introduction are largely devoted to creatures of the sea, as are portions of two others (chapters 5 and 8). Other than New Guinea, the islands of Oceania have few native land mammals. Chapter 6 deals with names of bird taxa and other terms associated with birds. Chapter 7 is entitled ‘Insects and other creepy-crawlies’, the latter including non-insect terrestrial invertebrates: spiders, centipedes, worms, leeches and grubs. The final chapter of this volume, chapter 8, investigates the semantic histories of several terms that may have been high-level generics or life-forms in the POc taxonomy of animals. It looks for recurrent patterns in the way different languages have extended or reduced the referential range of each of these terms.