Influence of Ecology and Economics on a Micronesian Fish Nomenclature

Technical vocabularies, such as those devoted to particular economic or religious functions, are likely to be known or spoken by only a small subset of native speakers. Examples of technical words and phrases in English include "laproscopic Nissen fundoplication," a surgical procedure, while from mathematics, "Goedel number," a composite number encoding a logical statement within its prime factors. Historically, technical terms have been subject to considerable change, as when the practices which they concern become modified or supplanted through Western economisation. Further, the kind and rate of linguistic change should be a function of the particular history of change to a culture. To test this idea, we studied a technical vocabulary, indigenous fish names used in the Mariana Islands, Micronesia. Based on interviews with fishermen from Saipan, Tinian, Rota and Guam, we found 265 indigenous terms for fishes, about 140 more than the next largest compilation of names (Topping et al 1977 Chamorro Dictionary Univ Hawaii Press). Three terms for economically important or dangerous fishes appear to be cognates with names for these species in other parts of Oceania. About 25% of names are borrowed, showing influences from Spanish, English, Japanese, Polynesian and Philippine languages. There were significantly fewer locally derived names for pelagic and deepwater species than for inshore and reef-inhabiting taxa. Further, borrowed names for inshore fishes were significantly more likely to derive from Spanish, while offshore species more frequently acquired English, Japanese or Hawaiian names. The high rate and pattern of borrowing are unique in Oceania and result from the interaction between fish ecology and the dramatic change in subsistence patterns experienced by islanders during early European colonisation of the Marianas. Below is a scene from pre-contact southern Guam as imagined by Jacques Arago, an artist aboard the French expeditionary ship Uranie (Freycinet 1824 Voyage Autour du Monde): communal chinchulu netting, possibly for the seasonally abundant scombrid atulai or bigeye scad, Selar crumenopthalmus.